Bleacher Report Goes Open Social
The cat is out of the bag. After weeks of speculation, Google is set to announce tonight their new OpenSocial set of API’s, a counterpoint to Facebook’s Platform and a new way of creating social web applications for multiple platforms. Bleacher Report has been working under the shroud of secrecy as an early tester of OpenSocial while during Google’s beta of the API (first impression=promising, but very buggy). Now, in anticipation of OpenSocial’s commercial release, we’re getting ready to roll out our own social apps.
What does this have to do with the Open Source Sports Network?
Well, first off, we just dig open platforms. Bleacher Report was conceived as an open platform for sports journalism, and we’re working to catch up on the software side.
More to the point, we were among the first sports sites to jump on the Facebook Platform bandwagon, rolling out our College Football application within weeks of the F8 announcement and quickly attracting over 100,000 users.
Bleacher Report is all about consolidating the insight and expertise of sports fans and then spreading it to as many places as possible. Our writers bring offer their knowledge to the community, and in turn it’s our job to get that knowledge as much exposure as possible.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working here at the Bleacher Report HQ as well as down at the Google Plex to get our applications ready for OpenSocial. When the curtain rises, we’ll be ready to roll out some pretty sweet social apps that will provide new ways for sports fans to flex their knowledge, as well as spread Bleacher Report content to new audiences.
So soon in addition to Facebook, your Bleacher Report articles could be showing up on MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, Friendster, and other OpenSocial partners as they come on board. Plus, some of the stuff we’re developing for OpenSocial will eventually find its way back to Bleacher Report in the form of new features.
This has been an exciting project to work on here at BR, and an overwhelmingly positive experience working with Google and some of the other third party participants in on the beta.
We’re excited about exposing the Bleacher Report community to even more platforms, and will have some more announcements to make along these lines in the near future.