The Shopit application that has become so popular with Facebook and MySpace is now available on the hi5 networks. I am a computer science student at the University of California, Los Angeles interning at Shopit and have been working over the past several weeks to bring this application to a true OpenSocial environment. OpenSocial initially had some stumbles but has now shown that it is capable of hosting robust and unique application experiences with easy portability.
The application provides users with a dashboard to view all the current incoming or outgoing orders, see the latest products, add or remove products, and even make purchases from start to finish all from within the hi5 network. This combination offers both a easy and friendly interface as well as a viral market for both buyers and sellers.
The biggest feature of any social application is sharing and with the Shopit application it is as easy as clicking share, selecting your friends, and watching your business spread. You can just as easily let your friends know when you’ve found a great deal. Save money on the products you need just by watching your notifications in hi5.
As an intern in a continuing learning experience I have found the development and testing of this application to be exciting. I was able to watch the power of the sharing features grow as I built them beneath my fingertips. The hi5 API is becoming more and more complete ever day as it moves towards OpenSocial 0.8 and a more finalized REST interface. Although I’m still awaiting a PHP client library.
Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys the application and finds those great deals. I will be heading off to explore Europe in my first backpacking experience next week. Thanks for your interest in my efforts. I’d also like to give a big thanks to Sameer and Eric, and the rest of the hi5 team for their continued help.

-Matt Snider

Wednesday I had the pleasure of flying up to San Francisco, CA along with Rhett McNulty, Shopit COO, for a PorC (Portable Contacts) hackathon hosted by Six Apart.  The plane ride was sick!  We flew Virgin America.  I watched TV, I played DOOM, and I even tried to chat with strangers via the Chat feature. Sadly nobody wanted to accept my chat invitation :(.

Once we got off the plane, we hopped on the BART and headed to the city.  We walked several blocks to the Six Apart office — thanks to David Recordon for hosting — and started munchin’ on some of the best pizza I’ve ever had.  Once we were plenty full, we got right to work hackin’ away on Portable Contacts.

At first we were having a few issues with the implementation but thanks to Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, we were able to get those all squared away.

I’m excited to fully implement all that PorC brings to the table.  It makes my job as a developer really easy and provides a lot for the Shopit users to easily transfer their data from their existing profiles.  For example, a user can come to Shopit and specify a social network like Plaxo and pull all of their data down with just a few clicks.  This data can be used to present users with products that they would be interested in purchasing by cross-checking our database of products with a users interest that are stored on the Plaxo side!

After a long night of fun, hangin’ out in a very informal setting, we called it a night.  We woke up and had coffee with some of Rhett’s buddies that happened to be driving through town.  His Buddies Jared and Mike are traveling across the country: surfing, mountain biking, and kayaking for a few months.  Living the dream.  They were kind enough to drop us off at MySpace for the Portable Contacts summit.

The Portable Contacts summit was very informative.  Joseph Smarr did a great job hosting the event and John McCrea did a great job managing it.  Diving in together felt like we were all playing a key part in setting the tone for the future of the web.  Because everything was so Open, we could do mashups of data without ever writing any code.  For example, Kevin Marks from Google and Joseph took the hCard data from Kevin’s twitter page and converted it to a vCard using technorati’s hCard to vCard converter.  They then used that vCard as a data endpoint for Portable Contacts.  This is super important because the architecture of the PorC standard was to follow existing Open standards like the vCard which maps one-to one.  Very cool. 

We finished up the night with some good beer (Pacifico) and a lot of help from Paul Lindner from hi5 for a little hack session the two of us had to hammer out a few OAuth issues we were having with our soon to be release Shopit hi5 app.  All is good.  Thanks Paul!

Stay tuned, more to come.  Tomorrow, we’re heading to Open Hack Day at Yahoo!

–Troy Payne (Social Apps guy)

Rhett McNulty, Shopit COO, and I flew up to Frisco for the day to attend the Socialmedia OpenThread meetup.  The flight was delayed, the train ride was sweet, and the beer was tasty.

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Eddie Smith and the rest of the team from Socialmedia put together a very nice meetup atmosphere with a little financial help from SUN.  There was lots of guac, salsa, chips, cheese, fresh fruit, nuts, and beer, OH MY!

We also received some sweet tee’s that said “Flex your apps” from Socialmedia (I wore mine today with my TOMS shoes).

My favorite presenter would have to be Paul from hi5 (Google was good too :-)) because of the tutorials (thanks!) and the fact that they are changing their page time-out interval just for us (thanks again!).

It was also nice chattin’ it up with one of the engineers from facebook (Luke Shephard). Cool guy.  He and I were discussing some issues they were having with their new east coast data center (ECDC) and memcache (hehe).

David King of (Lil) Green Patch was also there giving pointers.  It was great to meet and talk to him at the end of the presentations to get some dos and don’ts when it comes to the success of social applications.

After drinking some Blue Moon, and then finishing up with a little Pacifico… I think Pacifico was the better of the two but left me with a headache for me to enjoy on the flight home.

Because we couldn’t find a taxi near the Socialmedia offices at Pier 38 we had to take a Lincoln Continental, how awesome is that?

All in all, I had a good time.  Met cool people, learned some things, got a few questions answered, and even met a few app developers (Nimit Maru) of some of my favorite apps like Typing Tutor.

Until next time,

–Troy (apps honcho)