The Thais that bind social networks

The DevFest was a one-day technical workshop at which 350 Thai developers learnt how to create OpenSocial applications for iGoogle platforms and for Google's partners - social networking websites including eXo Platform, Friendster and hi5.

Google's developer advocate Patrick Chanezon said social networking was a global phenomenon that had created problems in the development of applications to serve many different social websites because developers had to rebuild application suits over again for every new site.

OpenSocial is designed to address this problem at the roots of its technology. It provides common "plumbing" to allow social applications to run on many different websites without requiring duplicated work by either developers or the websites.

"Google is a co-founder of OpenSocial. With partners such as eXo Platform, Friendster and hi5, we are helping Thai software developers to gather experience with a wide set of tools. These will enable them to develop huge distribution platforms for social applications and to allow social network users in Thailand to get greater enjoyment from sharing photos, playing games, arranging real-world meetings and interacting with their friends and communities," Chanezon said.

Since the launch of OpenSocial in November last year, more than 19 social webs have been implemented around the world and another 40 are committed to start up. As well, more than 3,000 applications have been developed using OpenSocial and about 400 million Internet users have enjoyed their use, he said.

"Social networking is a growing trend for Internet users in Thailand, and it is bringing many business opportunities for web developers and social-networking sites," Chanezon said.

According to Internet World Statistics, Thailand has 13.4 million Internet users, and a Nielsen survey found that 26 per cent of them use social networks for games and photo sharing as well as for business and enterprise applications.

Social networking is likely to provide opportunities for Web specialists among Thailand's 324,000 software developers, to build OpenSocial applications to serve millions of users locally and globally.

"It's an incredibly exciting time to be a Web developer in Thailand, with so many powerful APIs, open distribution platforms and development tools becoming available for easy use - and it's often free," Chanezon said.

He said Google's DevFest would help enable Thai Web developers to learn faster and better paths by which to create the next wave of social networking applications, working across all OpenSocial-enabled websites.

The DevFest was the first held in Southeast Asia and involved only Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Hi5 is the biggest social web in Thailand, with around 8 million Thai users. However, Friendster is the number one social web in Asia and Southeast Asia. It has localised to Thai language and has more than 100,000 users in Thailand.