Michael Arrington announced OpenSocial on TechCrunch two days before its official release. Prior to that, there were whispers everywhere about Google’s new social platform, but not many seemed to know what exactly was about to go down. Needless to say, this is good buzz. Two days before ‘launch’ the overwhelming mood among web developers, especially us who dwell in the realms of social networking, was one of intense (even feverish at some points) anticipation. What unfolded over the next few days, combined with what we observed of Facebook’s API venture, provides us a set of best practices that we can apply to an API release.