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Filipino developers would love to hear the competition that Google has launched. As part of Google’s support to the developers as well as to encourage the innovation on the OpenSocial platform, they organized an OpenSocial Gadget Contest for local developers. This is a great venue to put their coding skills and creativity to test as they build OpenSocial applications.

The top winner who will receive a Nintendo Wii as the top prize, will be picked by a panel of judges from Google, eXo Platform, Friendster, Globant and hi5. They will also choose three more winners who will receive an Apple iPod Touch each.

Filipino developers who want to join the contest can register and submit their OpenSocial applications at http://code.google.com/events/apacdevfest/contest until January 10, 2009. Every participant is limited to three entries. The criteria for choosing the winners are creativity and user appeal; internationalization (message bundles); use of other Google APIs; cross-platform operability; and use of App Engine for storing user data and hosting files.

The winning OpenSocial applications will be promoted, to the advantage of the developer, to drive widespread user adoption on OpenSocial partner websites. Their applications will reach hundreds of millions of Internet users worldwide. OpenSocial offers the developers the opportunity to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.

Before, when a developer built an application to work on one social network, it will have to be built all over again for it to work on another site. OpenSocial is addressing this problem and to encourage further developers who are building applications for social network. OpenSocial is tackling the problem at its technology roots and providing common “plumbing” to let the social applications run on many different websites.

The results of this initiative are social applications that will run on various distribution platforms – whether they are for playing games, sharing photos or arranging real-world meetings. Everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contact.

Members of the OpenSocial community includes Engage.com, Friendster, iGoogle, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Sales-force.com, SixApart, Viadeo, XING and Yahoo! They also have Asia-Pacific members which includes CityIN.com Douban.com, MySpace.cn , Daum.net idTail and Paran.com

Winners of the contest will be notified by January 26, 2009 while the formal announcement of the contest results will be on February 6, 2009.

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