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BRL MANILA, Philippines - With the growing popularity of social networking sites in the country, five of the top social networks in the world recently welcomed Filipino developers for the first-ever Google DevFest.
Google DevFest was a one-day technical workshop that was aimed to support the developer community and encourage innovation on the OpenSocial platform..
The Google DevFest was recently held at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman, Quezon City, where OpenSocial applications for the eXo Platform, Friendster, hi5 and iGoogle platforms were introduced to students, developers, and professionals who wanted to hone their skills in the said technology.
"It's an incredibly exciting time to be a web developer in the Philippines , with so many powerful APIs, open distribution platforms, and development tools becoming available for easy and often free use," said Google Developer Advocate Patrick Chanezon.
“Google DevFest will help shape the future of the social web for 24 million Internet users in the Philippines by enabling web developers to collaborate and learn about faster and better paths to create the next wave of social networking applications that work across all OpenSocial-enabled websites,” Chanezon added.
Recent studies showed that the Philippines is one of the top countries who utilized the Internet, whether work-related or just browsing the latest issues.
Likewise, a March 2008 study conducted by Universal McCann revealed that out of 29 countries including the U.S., China and Japan, the Philippines has the highest percentage of Internet users using social networks..
The study noted that 83 percnt of the Philippines 24 million Internet users have created social network profiles. The Philippines also came out on top in specific social networking activities.
The country also garnered the highest percentage of users who have uploaded photos to social networks with 86 percent rating, the highest percentage of users who have watched videos on YouTube 99 percent, and second-highest percentage of users who read blogs 90 percent.
According to Evans Data Corporation, the OpenSocial-enabled social networking sites like Friendster, hi5 and eXo Platform provide opportunities for over 50,000 Filipino web developers to build OpenSocial for hundreds of million of users in the Philippines and worldwide.
Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, iGoogle, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, SixApart, Viadeo, XING, Yahoo! and others. Asia Pacific members include: in China - 51.com, 51wan.com, CityIN.com, Douban.com, Hainei.com, MySpace..cn, Tianji.com, Tianya.cn, Xiaonei.com, YiQi.com; in Japan - Goo, Mixi, OpenPNE; in Korea - Daum.net, idTail, Paran.com. OpenSocial now offers developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.
At Google DevFest, developers got practical advice for building web applications from Google engineers and technical tips for working with social networking platforms from eXo Platform, Friendster, Globant and hi5.