Mixi’s new platform feature: "Apps for Touch"

We are happy to announce that a smart-phone platform has been launched on mixi Platform.

mixi Platform supports OpenSocial v0.8.1 and have executed applications for two devices “PC desktop” and “Japanese feature-phones” last year. The specification of our feature-phone platform has been proposed as the “OpenSocial WAP extension”, and this specification has been adopted by other platforms in Japan. If you would like to know more, please check the link below:

Recently, we have launched a new feature to mixi Platform. We call it “mixi apps for Touch”. The saturation level of smart-phones is currently increasing in Japan as many people already use the iPhone, and there are many release plans of smart-phones based on Android. Currently, 17 applications have already been launched as mixi apps for Touch, and these developers have attracted many users. The below image is the screenshot of one mixi application executed on the smart-phone. A single mixi application can support three devices — PCs, feature-phones and smrt-phones at same time.


Figure 1. Screenshots of mixi apps for Touch

Basically, mixi apps for Touch is a Web browser based application and is not a native iPhone/Android application which you download from an application market/store. Technically, the view name of mixi apps for Touch is “touch”, and the value of the type attribute is specified as “url”. This definition is written in gadget spec file with definitions for other devices. The below image is the architecture to describe mixi apps for Touch.


Figure 2. Architecture of mixi apps for Touch

The application is executed in the iframe placed on mixi’s page. One of mixi app’s features is that the domain in the iframe is not mixi’s domain, and is of the developer’s server. Therefore, application developers can generate the contents on his/her server similarly to developing a general web site.

Developers need the OpenSocial RESTful API to use social data, and a 2-legged OAuth is adopted to the authorization mechanism. On the other hand, when developers want to use APIs (invitation, posting activity, and etc) with a user-flow (need to show Popup window), a JavaScript file provided by mixi Platform is loaded by using a script tag. The function written in the script file calls the function which exists on the parent frame, and the user-flow will be executed. Of course, Payment and Ad programs are available for monetization (the Payment API is based on OpenSocial Virtual Currency API).

We believe that our platform will be able to bring OpenSocial more scaling to many devices. For more information, please visit our developer’s site “mixi Developer Center”.

For more information, please visit the mixi Developer Center.

Posted on behalf of Yoichiro Tanaka, mixi, Inc., by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

Google Developer Days: Meet the Google Geo Engineers

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo APIs Team

Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events, are back and will take place in locations around the world. We’ve designed these events for developers with strong coding backgrounds, so that we can discuss our APIs, developer tools and applications.

We’ll host Google Developer Days in these locations:

  • Yokohama, Japan (June 10)
  • Beijing, China (June 12)
  • Taipei, Taiwan (June 14)
  • Sydney, Australia (June 18)
  • Mexico City, Mexico (June 23)
  • Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 27)
  • London, UK (Sept 16)
  • Paris, France (Sept 18)
  • Munich, Germany (Sept 23)
  • Madrid, Spain (Sept 25)
  • Milan, Italy (Oct 21)
  • Prague, Czech (Oct 23)
  • Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)

If you’re based in the US, we encourage you to come to Google I/O, on May 28-29 in San Francisco.

At Google Developer Day, our Maps and KML engineers will share their inside knowledge on our developer tools and APIs, including the Google Maps API and KML. In many locations we’ll do deep dives into code and conduct hands-on codelabs. If you come to Yokohama and Mexico City, say hi to me and Pamela Fox.

We’ve posted detailed information for our early dates and will be adding more information for other locations soon. If you’re a developer, we encourage you to sign-up for a Google Developer Day at a nearby location. I hope to see you there.

We’re Going to Google I/O!

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

I’m getting excited about Google I/O May 28th & 29th in San Francisco. The reason I’m excited is that many of you will be there too, and it will be a great chance to meet. Google I/O is like the Google Developer Day we had last year, which in turn was based on Google Geo Developer Day, which we had two years ago. This year, there will be a whole track on Maps & Geo, including KML, Maps, and Mapplets. There will, of course, be other tracks, AJAX, APIs & Tools, Social, and Mobile. Both Pamela and I will be there, along with all the Google Geo stars.

The event won’t be limited to just Google APIs and developer tools. There is a lot of knowledge about web development in general at Google, and we’d like to share that expertise so that all applications on the web get better. And of course, we’re focusing a lot on Open Source tools, like the new libkml (more about that in a later post).

Over the two days of Google I/O, Google engineers and other leading software developers will share their knowledge in breakout sessions, hands-on Code Labs, and Q&A Fireside Chats. That’s your chance to sit down with Google engineers and ask all the questions you’ve ever wanted to, as well as meet each other.

Visit the Google I/O website to learn more and register. Space is limited, so be sure to make plans to attend now.

And after Google I/O, we’ll be doing other developer days all over the world, so if you can’t make it to SF, hopefully you can make it to one closer to you.