As Frank said yesterday in KDE 4.3 there will be the beginning to the support of the OpenSocial API, this is still fairly limited and at an experimental stage, but we did roll out something, to test the libraries and get people use it, bot users and programmers.

So now we have basically 3 things:

A client library (lib Attica) that connects to the opendesktop.org API, supporting a part of the specification.
A Plasma dataengine that use said library
An Opendesktop Plasma widget that displays the user profile, lists friends and geographically near users (and if you are in a foreign city with your laptop that’s beyond cool :D)

For this work many props to Sebas and Cornelius that did most of the work 😀

What i did was the support for the knowledge base into the library and into the dataengine, and this luckily made into KDE 4.3

Now a plasma widget is in progress, that is in playground as usual, and will be in KDE 4.4. (probably i will make a standalone release on kde-look before, if it won’t use too much 4.4-specific code, but i always tend to make uber bleeding-edge code, soo we’ll see :p), you can see the result here:

OGG version

Entries of Opendesktop items, (so kde-look and gnome-look themes, kde-apps and so forth) have a knowledge base associated to them where users can ask (and of course answer) question about them, with this plasma widget you can search and browse the questions and answers about all items on opendesktop.org, where another interesting application of the concept is to search into the knowledgebase for instance of a particular kde application… directly in the application itself. and since a general purpose library is getting in shape, that will be quite easy actually.

Aaand hopefully with this competition we can find new contributors to the project (we poor plasma developers can only do so much, right? :P), so if you are interested in doing something for the KDE integration, make sure to check out the ocs dataengine with the Attica lib (in kdeplasma-addons) and look at it both as and user of them (i.e. to do cool widgets or other apps) or to contribute to the library itself 🙂