Developer / Blog
-
Netlog embraces OpenSocial
Fresh from the announcement at Google I/O, we're excited to share some more details about Netlog and OpenSocial. First of all, here's the slides from the presentation Pieter did:
For those of you unfamiliar with Netlog, here's a few introductory numbers; Based in Belgium, our social network has 35 million members and serves 35 million unique visitors, viewing over 4 billion pages each month. As the marketleader or challenger in most European countries, we've got a unique pan-European position, with localised versions in 20 languages. For more details on Netlog as a company, you might want to check out our corporate site at corporate.netlog.com.
From now on, you're able to reach this unique userbase through OpenSocial as part of the Netlog Developer Platform. For those unfamiliar with OpenSocial, it defines a common set of API's for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access the social network context; profile info, friend's data, the activity stream, etc.
Joining Hi5, Yahoo, AOL, Ning and other websites, Netlog is now an OpenSocial container and will play a role in evangelising OpenSocial throughout the continent this summer. Full details on the apps that will be allowed on our network can be found in the application guidelines, but it boils down to a simple principle. In our philosophy the users are king, so we want them to get the best, we want them to enjoy quality applications.
Here's how we think we can do this; Autoplay or advertisments in the 'profile' view of your applications are definitely not done. We also don't want to spam our users with application requests, so we won't allow applications that do little more than 'being viral'. Since our sites are targeted and localised in several languages, we'll expect the same from the applications. The initial launch of OpenSocial applications will be on our English distribution, but soon after that we'll roll out applications in all other languages as well. If you need any help translating or localising your application, be sure to contact us for assistance.
So, what's in it for you, the developer? Depending on what your business model would be, you might want to get rewarded for developing a cool and popular app. For starters, we'll give you 100% revenue from optional advertisements on the 'canvas' view of your application (a vertical rectangle or skyscraper). Branding, co-branding and sponsorships are also allowed.
Next to advertising, we'll be granting developers access to our unique "credits economy". Netlog users can buy (via micro-payments) or earn credits they can use to eg. advertise themselves on overview pages, spend on gifts, etc. We're offering developers a 'Credits API' as an extension to OpenSocial, allowing your application to charge and make use of these credits. A nifty app for example might ask for a single install fee, or a monthly fee. We'll pay out your app's credits at 65% of the net revenue of those credits, based on the current exchange rate. We're convinced this will lead to more great, quality apps.
Another thing we're really excited about, and think will make your apps stand out on Netlog, is the ecosystem that will be surrounding apps. An application will be able to reach further than just the 'profile' and 'canvas' views. On Netlog you'll have full access to a blog for your application, a guestbook, you can post video tutorials, customize the layout of your application profile, etc. Applications will benefit from the same possibilities any other Netlog member has. We hope this will aid you in getting users committed and excited about your application, and it will provide a great resource for feedback.
As for our OpenSocial roadmap, we currently have an OpenSocial sandbox ready, where you can test your apps to our current OpenSocial 0.7 implementation. If you've got any problems with getting your app ready, we're here to help you out. June 5th is the deadline for the first selection of apps we'll be launching with. Starting from June 9th we will be rolling out these apps little by little. The idea is to have them available to everyone on the English site, but only promote them to a select group of users. We'll be gradually increasing this select group of users, so we can have a controlled growth and make sure our infrastructure is ready for your apps. We expect to have the platform fully ready and launched publicly on the English distribution by the end of June. Soon after all other languages will follow. Don't miss this great opportunity to rank yourself among the first apps on Netlog. We're very excited to see which apps you'll come up with!
PS: A warm welcome to all people arriving here via Google I/O, Mashable or The Next Web. -
Skin Development for Netlog
Would you like to contribute to Netlog with a skin? Or does your brand profile need a custom skin? Netlog has a skin creator tool that allows all members to customise their personal profile pages, but as contributer and/or brand owner you might want to take full control over the css and images of your own custom skin. So the nice people from design at Netlog have made a little kit available with all details, guidelines, examplary images, do's and don't's to create a custom full featured skin for Netlog.
Get started creating your own Netlog Skin. -
Welcome to the Netlog Developer blog!
Developers! Developers! Developers!
We're glad you've found your way to the developer pages of Netlog,
. On this brand new blog the Netlog development and ITS team will be keeping you up to date on what's possible and what's happening in the larger Netlog developer community.
This is the place where you can learn about and experiment with the different API's and tools Netlog is offering and developing. You might want to start with a look at our OpenSocial pages.
Be sure to subscribe to our Developer Blog feed. If you want to join the discussion, give feedback or ask some questions, you might want to checkout the Developers discussion group. -
New RSS and iCal feeds available
Today we're rolling out a bunch of new RSS and iCal feeds for our members to digest. It's now possible to syndicate your friendslog, or notifications in your favorite RSS reader. Apart from that, we've also set up an iCal feed with the future birthdays of your friends.
Users can get an overview of their feeds in their privacy panel, where they can also configure the private access. For developers we've created a complete overview.
-
Technological Edge
Netlog works with cutting edge open source technology, governs a park with more than 1500 high-end servers, and is driven by two strong technical teams: ITS and Development.
The ITS team loadbalances and routes more than 8 Gbps iptraffic. More than 4,5 billion monthly page views are served from Apache, Lighttpd, NginX. The service is essential in monitoring, configuring and tuning over 1500 DELL state-of-the-art Poweredge servers (quad core, 8 to 16 GB RAM). It deploys, replicates and scales over 500 MySQL database machines doing a total average of 650 000 queries/sec. ITS is responsible for backing up and managing more than 100 TB of data. The servers are located in 2 datacenters in Brussels.
Development codes, profiles and invents SQL statements aimed for performance sub. The 13 headed team makes PHP5 work with its Memcached caching battery of more than 2 TB RAM memory. The team is essential for inventing the next big thing built on AJAX using and expanding script.
-
Introducing the technical team at Netlog
At Netlog we have a technical department of 21 bright minds. At the moment we've got 10 developers, 4 designers and 4 people at operations. The team is led by Toon Coppens, our CTO, Folke Lemaitre, director of development and Nicolas Van Eenaeme, director of ITS.
Developers Jasper, Jayme, Joost, Jurriaan en Maarten are working on the core features of Netlog. Pieter is focusing on the Netlog API and OpenSocial integration. Stijn is a Sales Developer working tightly with our sales and marketing team. Francis and Lieven are our Desktop developers bringing you tools like Netlog 24, our music scrobbler and photo and video uploaders. Tristan is the Flash guy around here. The design team is Demis, Lennart, Micha and Jared. Steven, Dieter, Kenny and Jakob is our ITS department, keeping the site online, 24/7. They manage a server park of, as we speak, 1500 high-end servers.
Read more about the technologies we're using here. Interested in joining our team? We're hiring! -
Get Your Frontend Sorted
At BarCamp Gent, March 29th, Lennart - our lead designer - and Jurriaan - from development - held a presentation about all things frontend at Netlog. It’s a bunch of thoughts, experiences and stuff we learnt while working on a css and javascript frontend for Netlog. While that frontend’s far from being a finished and fully optimized product, we think there’s somehow a few tips we could share;
The 89 slides focus on design first, with a few practical tips showing how we try to keep things organised. In a second part the structure of the javascript is explained, and the presentation finishes with an overview of things we came across while implementing some of the performance rules.
There’s a video recording of the presentation too, thanks to Luc Van Braekel.
Credit where credit is due, so a shout out to the Yahoo Performance team and Steve Souders for stressing the importance of frontend performance, to Firebug & YSlow! for being indispensible tools, and to our colleagues for making Netlog an inspiring company to work for.
Tags
Feedback
Do you want to respond to a post or give us feedback? Check out our discussion group and join in on the conversation.