I would love to see a credible/viable open source option emerge that can support a distributed and/or federated model for social network sites. Still hopeful that Apache SocialSite Project Incubation Status can gain traction.

Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating released

Thursday, July 02, 2009 at 10:58:00 AM

Apache Shindig aims to make it simple to create your own OpenSocial container by providing an open source implementation (in both Java and PHP) of the OpenSocial APIs. The Shindig team recently made creating and maintaining an OpenSocial container even easier, by publishing a release that supports OpenSocial v0.8.1.

OpenSocial API Blog: Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating released

Additional background info:

Apache Shindig Components

Server Side

The Java and PHP version of Apache Shindig have 3 major server side components:

1. Persistent Data Loading Mechanism;
2. Gadget Rendering Infrastructure;
3. OpenSocial server side implementation.

Components of Apache Shindig Java Server Side container

Components of Apache Shindig PHP Server Side container

Client Side

The Javascript features are:

• Gadget container (gadget.js), fully opensocial gadget compliant;
• OpenSocial container;
• JSON, Restful container and Caja support.

Shindig - Overview Of Apache Shindig