Howto write an application for social networks

I've been seeing more and more applications for social networks (like Hi5). What I didn't realise was that it existed a standard API for developing those applications. OpenSocial is a reference API by Google that is being used by some of the major social networks (LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace). It makes sense as it allows a developer to create an application or gadget that works in several social networks, or even allows communication between those.
And this explains the amount of new applications that are emerging every day. Still, it amazes me how a consensus was reached to allow this to happen. I thought only W3C had the power to do that. On the other hand, Google is becoming more "standard" than anything else...
On the technical side, the OpenSocial site seems quite good, with lots of documentation and sample applications. I didn't have the time to read the API itself, but being so well documented it's a great thing. It makes me think it must be easy to implement this kind of applications. It makes me wanna implement something :)
This also makes me wonder how many interesting Google projects are there that I still never heard of...

Exhibit 2.0 - Javascript web framework

I just discovered Exhibit and I'm amazed by its simplicity. Exhibit is a web framework written in Javascript that you can use to display data. It's not a general purpose framework. It's focused on displaying data in several formats, like interactive tables, maps, graphs, etc.
What I like about Exhibit is how simple it is to use. Everything is done in a simple HTML file! You heard me right, just HTML. The framework is done in Javascript, and it does all the data manipulation. You just have to add some special attributes to the HTML tags in order to specify how data is going to be shown. That's the presentation part of the framework. The data itself has to be in JSON format. Just add a link tag pointing at the js file with your data structure and you're all set. This is actually very flexible. In a simple case you can point to a static js file. But you can also point to an URL that dynamically generates your JSON data.
Exhibit then gives you a few presentation choices. One of them is trough Google Maps. This way you can create mash ups quite easily. Interactive tables that allow filtering and sorting also look nice.
Exhibit is part of SIMILE project, a joint effort conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL. So simple, but it can be quite useful...and pretty cool.

Pyhton developers hired by Sun

This is interesting news:

Python’s future looks bright by ZDNet's Ed Burnette -- It always warms my heart to see good programmers get the recognition they deserve. This week, Sun announced they were hiring Ted Leung (long-time Python developer), and Frank Wierzbicki (lead implementer of the Jython project). They’ll be working full-time on Jython and in particular paying attention to developer tools. Ted and Frank join Charles Nutter, Thomas [...]

Although Jython is not new, this shows the current trend in Sun: to support as many languages as possible in the VM. It's nice to see that not all eggs are being put in the same basket (Ruby) and Python is also getting some attention. I specially like that because I prefer Python over Ruby. This also reminds me of putting Jython in my ToDo list of technologies to check out :)