Google has posted videos of all the sessions at the recent Google I/O 2009 developer’s conference.

SAP attended as part of the session on “OpenSocial in the Enterprise”). Overall, the session was a little disorganized and meandering, but it did end up giving an overview of what companies like IBM, Oracle, SalesForce.com, and Atlassian are doing to leverage social networking technologies such as OpenSocial within organizations:

• Mark Weitzel gave a demo of the IBM Mashup Center proof of concept, allowing you to create mashup pages, using messaging between different sources (based on OpenAjax, but can integrate with OpenSocial) (link directly to this demo)
• Rich Manalang from Oracle gave a demonstration of Oracle’s internal collaboration system, called “Oracle Connect”. (link directly to this demo)
• Dave Carroll of Salesforce.com showed how they have been working with customers to add collaboration to the CRM experience (link directly to this demo)
• Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian showed how OpenSocial could be used to link enterprise applications, and between applications and gmail. For more, see http://atlassian.com/opensocial (link directly to this demo)

The highlight of the session (OK, so I’m biased) was a demonstration by John Mayerhofer, VP, Standards Strategy Group of SAP, showing the Social Network Analyzer technology (see below, or link directly to this demo)

Unfortunately, not much time was left for Q&A session. The most interesting question was about “What are the barriers to social systems in the enterprise?” and the answers included a mix of technical and social concerns:

• Security and identity were mentioned as special problems.
• There was some frustration than social networking APIs don’t take into account enterprise needs.
• Exposure to the consumer social networks actually leaves a negative impression, people fear that it’s just about socializing, rather than collaborating.
• Everybody agreed that it was early days
• The session ended with a hopelessly vague question/comment about needing to “liberate users” rather “concentrating on the enterprise”.

In the year and half since OpenSocial’s public launch, there are now over 700 million end users of OpenSocial applications across numerous social sites (containers) around the world. With OpenSocial’s proven global success in traditional social applications, the enterprise software community has now begun to realize its potential and build innovative solutions that cater to the enterprise. Join us for a session centered on how the enterprise software development community is successfully bringing social concepts and technology into the enterprise. Key enterprise players will present and demonstrate how they’ve successfully used OpenSocial software to build new social solutions.

The SAP BusinessObjects Social Network Analyzer (SNA) prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center uses an ATOM-based RESTful API inspired from Open Social but extended to cover enterprise requirements and richness. It is used to communicate between the SNA client and the “Relationship Analysis Server”, as illustrated below.

If you’re a partner (VAR, OEM) or an application developer and are interested in the API, or would like to build a new client for the Relationship Analysis Server, the documentation is available for download. It explains how a specific client can login, search for entities, and extract profiles networks and paths from the Relationship Analysis Server using simple HTTP requests. See the example page below for more information.