Guidelines for Developers porting their OpenSocial Applications from a different social network container to Ning

[Ernie H.]

Hi everyone!

So, the good news is that there have been a lot of applications to review for the Ning Application Directory. More Applications mean more variety, and that's a good thing.

But the bad news is this: because a lot of OpenSocial Application developers haven't taken the time to look at the Best Practices page on the Ning OpenSocial Documentation, we've had to reject a lot of the applications right off the bat, or at least it's been a lengthy process.

The biggest guidelines to follow are the following:

1. Make sure the attributes of your Application are properly filled out.
The attributes in the tag of your Application stores important meta-data about your OpenSocial Application. Some of these attributes are required, such as the title, description, thumbnail, and screenshot attributes, but if you wish you can include other pieces of meta-data such as the author and author_email fields, and the respective values will be displayed in your Application's "About View" page.

• Title: This will be the name of your application in the Directory, Profile Page, About Page and Canvas Page. Try to keep it under 40 characters.
• Thumbnail: This should be 120x60. It is a logo that you want to associate with your application, and will be displayed in the Application Directory.
• Description: The description is displayed in the Directory, and also on the About Page above the screenshot.
• Screenshot: This can be a maximum of 502 px wide (and 1000 px high). It will be displayed on the About page below the description.

2. Preview your Application on a social network on Ning.
Follow these instructions on how you can manually add your XML file to test your OpenSocial Application. Please do this - if there are obvious errors or blank screens or usability errors, we will instantly reject your application.

3. We can not accept Applications which shares a profile photo of a Ning Network with other social networks. Ning allows people to create networks about anything and we recognize that some subject matter that is acceptable to one group can be offensive to other people. As a result, we are not adding applications to the directory that use avatars shared across multiple social networks at this time.

I'm available to answer any questions you as a developer may have.

Thanks!
- Ernie