What's New in MySpace OpenSocial 0.8

Published January 8, 2008 by Chad Russell.

The spec for OpenSocial 0.8 has been finalized and MySpace's implementation has been released. There are some key benefits that 0.8 adds over 0.7 on the MySpace platform. The JavaScript container more closely conforms to the spec and some MySpace specific extensions have been pulled into the OpenSocial namespace. The result of this is that your 0.8 app will port much more easily to other platforms than your 0.7 app did. The app data API has been cleaned up and made more useful.

There are also important new features and capabilities on the MySpace platform that are only available to 0.8 apps:

• Open Canvas allows your app to be functional for users even before they have added the app. Learn more about Open Canvas.
• Custom App Activities allow 0.8 apps to post activities into user Friend Updates. Learn more about Custom App Activities.
• App Notifications will allow apps to message their users directly, and will only be available on 0.8

In this three part series of articles, I’ll walk you through the process of creating an application from start to finish with emphasis on the six major improvements that distinguish 0.8 from 0.7 on MySpace:

1. Enhancements to the opensocial.Person object
2. Our new permission model, dubbed Open Canvas, that makes extensive use of opensocial.hasPermission and opensocial.requestPermission
3. Updates to app data to accept only valid JSON
4. The deprecation of PostTo in favor of opensocial.requestShareApp and opensocial.requsetSendMessage
5. Activities
6. App Notifications