If you are interested in hosting OpenSocial compatible widgets in your web site you’ll probably want to keep an eye on the open source project Shindig. What is it? As Google product manager Dan Peterson describes in Let’s get this shindig started: “Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator (as per the formal proposal) that aims to provide an open source reference implementation of the entire OpenSocial stack — Shindig’s goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in well under an hour’s worth of work.” This source “is based upon code that has been powering Google Gadgets and iGoogle for the past few years and is meant to bootstrap the Shindig project.”

It’s a multi-part project and this first commit includes code for the first two of the four components below:

• Gadget Container JavaScript — core JavaScript foundation for general gadget functionality (read more about gadget functionality). This JavaScript manages security, communication, UI layout, and feature extensions, such as the OpenSocial API.
• Gadget Server — an open source version of gmodules.com, which is used to render the gadget xml into JavaScript and HTML for the container to expose via the container JavaScript.
• OpenSocial Container JavaScript — JavaScript environment that sits on top of the Gadget Container JS and provides OpenSocial specific functionality (profiles, friends, activities).
• OpenSocial Gateway Server — an open source implementation of the server interface to container-specific information, including the OpenSocial REST APIs, with clear extension points so others can connect it to their own backends.

This initial release has not yet been tested for “production-level traffic” but can help folks get started. If or how you use this also depends on your team’s skillset: “While the initial contribution of the Gadget Server was written in Java, Shindig is language neutral. Ning is planning to contribute an initial version of a PHP Gadget Server, and we’ve heard rumors of C#, Perl, and Ruby.”

With Facebook now licensing their code and Google working to foster a community around OpenSocial and Shindig it looks like news in the social API space won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

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For nostalgic hippies in the SF bay area, this was the 40th anniversary of 1967’s famous Summer of Love. But for every Silicon Valley developer, entrepreneur, and VC who has a pulse it’s been the Summer of Facebook.

While it’s easy to put aside geeky exuberance over the latest insanely great technology, it’s impossible to ignore the growing size and scope of Facebook, and the impact it’s having on internet startups and traditional businesses alike. Over half of Facebook’s 43 million users visit every day, spend an average of 20 minutes on the site, and view over 54 billion total page views per month.

In a few short months Facebook has quickly become one of the most impressive user acquisition channels on the web, rivaling SEO & SEM strategies for priority with new startups. Over 60 Facebook applications have more than 1 million total users, and over 40 have at least 100,000 daily users.

With the groundbreaking launch of the Facebook Platform this past spring, and the subsequent runaway growth of Facebook Apps adopted by millions of users this summer, the question on everyone’s lips (including Google and Microsoft) has been: “So what’s your Facebook strategy?”. If you’re still scrambling to figure out yours, read on.

Personally I’ve become addicted to Facebook, and in particular with the Facebook Platform and the News Feed. I’ve spent hours upon hours experimenting with new ways it provides to connect and communicate, and recently began teaching a class at Stanford with Professor BJ Fogg on how to build Facebook apps. In this article i’ll explain how to use Facebook to make a big impact on your business, and why it’s substantially different than any other social network that’s come before.

Here are seven major aspects of Facebook you can use to increase the visibility of your startup, business, product or service:

1. Set Up Your Graph: Profiles & Privacy
2. Make Connections: Networks, Groups & Events
3. The Need for Feed: Your [Shared] Social Activity Stream
4. Share Your Content: Share & People-Tag Your Stories & Media
5. App to the Future: The Facebook Platform, APIs, & Applications
6. Pay to Play: Ad Networks, Sponsored Stories, & Paid Distribution
7. Show Me The Bunny: Gifts, Points, & Virtual Currency

I’ll explore each of these items in more detail after the jump. For developers and marketers interested in learning more, we’ll be covering these topics in depth next week in San Jose at Graphing Social Patterns, a conference on the business and technology of Facebook and social networking.

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oDesk, a next generation marketplace for contract developers, has recently seen a spike in requests for Facebook developers.

oDesk offers developers a number of aptitude tests to certify their programming skills in various areas – existing tests include Ajax, CSS, .Net, DHTML and ASP, among others. They’ve now added a forty minute Facebook aptitude test as well. Companies can now sort through developers based on their skill level in creating Facebook applications.

In related news, VentureBeat is reporting that a new course, called Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook will be offered this fall in Stanford’s computer science department. Dave McClure is a co-instructor.

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Here’s another indication of the importance of the new Facebook platform: Silicon Valley VC fund Bay Partners has earmarked millions of dollars for investments in startups creating applications for Facebook. The new program, called AppFactory, will be officially launched on Tuesday.

Like the Charles River Ventures Quick Start program, the idea is to allow entrepreneurs to raise a small amount of capital with a minimum number of hurdles. Bay is promising to make a decision to invest within a couple of days of meeting the company, bypassing the normally weeks-long process of raising capital.

Unlike the CRV fund, though, AppFactory is investing only new Facebook applications. Salil Deshpande, the Bay Partner who will run the program along with senior associate Angela Strange, says that Facebook is now the Social Operating System, and that new platforms and systems historically lead to a new economy. Bay wants to be in the middle of that economy and fund as many of the “killer applications” as they are able to find.

Salil says 40,000 developers have requested keys from Facebook to create applications, and over 1,600 have already launched on Facebook.

AppFactory will be making up to fifty investments ranging from $25,000 to $250,000. Salil says that they have preferred deal terms, but are willing to consider making equity or debt investments, and will work with co-investors as well. Basically, he says, they want to help entrepreneurs build and monetize Facebook applications with a minimum of hassle.

Is the Facebook platform real? Some people question the intelligence of entrepreneurs who build their new companies entirely on the back of another startup. But in general I agree with venture capitalist Josh Kopelman – building for Facebook removes many of the risks associated with getting a startup off the ground.

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