OpenSocial Gadgets

You can see a gadget on Hyves as an piece of code that is hosted on your own webserver. For example your own webserver or that of a hostingcompany. Hyves does not host any gadgets, but we do cache them every day. Only the developer/owner can add the gadget to the the live-environment of Hyves. Then it is possible to add a gadget to your own profile and other Hyvers can do this for them selfs. You can see examples of gadgets on Hyves in our gadgetgallery: http://www.hyves.nl/gadgetgallery. To build a social gadget you can use OpenSocial on our network.

There are different possibilities with gadgets on Hyves. Some are really simple, others are really advanced. The Sky is the limit ;) You can use the social-data from your friends, you can read out who of your friends also have the gadget installed or get data from an external database based on the Hyves-userID or use data from a XML-Feed. With this data you can develop a gadget that is based on a specific Hyver. It is also very simple to share a gadget with friends and let them spread the word through the Hyves-social-network.

More general information here.

Possibilities with OpenSocial

With the gadget technique called OpenSocial it is possible to use a standard set of "API's", for example: it's possible to know who is viewing the gadget (the so called Viewer) and depending on this you can get the available social data. With this functionality you can for example post a high-score of the Viewer, the name that you can use is retrieved through OpenSocial (a function like opensocial.newDataRequest() wil have to be called), this can be saved in your own database or on a tiny little data-space within OpenSocial. It is also possible to detect if the Viewer is also the Owner. This way you can show different content for the Viewer then for the Owner like prefs or personalized data. For example: the owner could upload or select photo's to show in the gadget and the viewer can only see these foto's but can't select any.

At the moment the following information is available within OpenSocial: (this is for the Viewer, Owner and Friends)

• Userid
• Givenname
• Familyname
• Displayname/Nickname (smileys are stripped)
• Gender
• Address (only city and country are available)
• Date of birth
• Profile url
• Thumbnail url (different sizes)

Hyves photo albums (media) can not be requested within OpenSocial. We will try to support this in the future.

More specifications here

Start

You can see how to start with developing over here.

May from your creativity spring the best Hyves gadgets.

Hyves OpenSocial team