Viadeo to Support New OpenSocial API

Viadeo today announced its participation in and support for the new OpenSocial toolkit launched today by Google as a fundamental step toward making the web more social more quickly and easily.

On stage in Mountain View (California) for the official launch of OpenSocial during Google ìCampfire 1î, Viadeo is the only European business social network to have been involved in the development of OpenSocial from the outset. Viadeoís development team has already created its first OpenSocial application, ëViadeo Question & Answerí (www.viadeo.com/videos/demo.swf ) where members can leverage their network to ask question and get answers from the whole Viadeo network. Viadeoís website is today 100% OpenSocial compliant.

By supporting OpenSocial, Viadeo (www.viadeo.com ), one of the worldís largest business social networks, with three million registered members worldwide (1.8m in Europe and 1.2m in China through Tianji www.tianji.com ) is demonstrating its support for an open web. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn, which will enable their applications to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. Viadeoís commitment to OpenSocial will encourage innovation and enable its members to access a wider variety of new applications more quickly.

Dan Serfaty, CEO of Viadeo, commented: ìViadeo is growing incredibly fast - at a rate of 7,000 new members every day - and there is a demand for many new kinds of applications within our network to further enhance the user experience. By being OpenSocial-enabled, we want to encourage innovation across the social web by unshackling developers and incentivising them to create applications that work across multiple sites and reach vast audiences. This is great news for Viadeo members as they will benefit from a host of richer applications for an even better business and social networking experience.î

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs, launched today by Google, for building social applications on the web. Common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications. OpenSocial will bring more powerful and pervasive social capabilities to the web because developers will be able to develop and distribute their applications more easily. Users will be able to enjoy new social features faster and in more of the websites, web applications, and social networks they use. More information is available at code.google.com