Google Unravels Partuza, A Sample Social Network For Testing OpenSocial Widgets

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has launched a sandbox for developers to use in order to test out the OpenSocial API.  The name of the sandbox is called Partuza (or “party” in Spanish).  The site is available at: http://www.partuza.nl/.  The instructions for building a widget for Partuza is available at: http://code.google.com/p/partuza/.

Partuza was written in PHP using an Apache open source license.  The Google Code page teaches developers how to use PHP Shindig for adding OpenSocial support on their own sites too.  Google Code also teaches developers how to take the code and integrate it into other social networks using Partuza as an example.

Partuza was developed by Chris Chabot.  Chabot is a software engineer at H2Services.  Chabot is also on the project management team at the Apache Software Foundation.  Essentially, Google took Chabot’s work and built support around it.  Google hopes that supporting the work of a third party engineer will encourage other developers to stay interested in developing APIs around OpenSocial.

OpenSocial is an initiative started by Google where a community of developers have access to a set of open source APIs in order to create applications that runs on a plethora of social networks.

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