I introduced the Social Mobile Framework being contributed to Symbian^4 by Sasken in December. Since then, the guys have been hard at work getting the proposal together and the Package Owner, Chandradeep, has published a draft architecture for the technology on the package wiki. Sasken and Symbian would like to invite those interested in the developer community to help us make this great by sharing expertise in an open design review.
Application developers reading this post will know what a difference it makes to start listening to the community early and welcome review contributions at this stage just as we would welcome code later in the project. It’s all about seeking contributions in whatever form you want to make them; we’re open to ideas, code and in this case design contribution. We could keep everything under wraps until shortly before handsets hit the market, then open the doors and call it “open source”, but that’s not the kind of surprise anyone would thank us for and it won’t make for as compelling a product anyway.
Governance of the Symbian platform is truly open and this project is a great demonstration of what a difference it can make to those involved. When we started this project it was nothing more than a suggestion I made on our ideas website. Discussion kicked off and Sasken stepped forward with an interest in making it happen, then put the proposal together and took it to our councils.
Do you write, or plan to write, Symbian applications making use of social networking services such as Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and MySpace? Do you provide a web service API for online communities? Then I’d recommend reading the architecture proposal, joining the mailing list and checking the forum discussion to get your voice heard. No more surprises, you are in control! 
Hi Chandradeep,
While the intention of providing a unified framework for these different services is honourable, have you thought about alternatives? Twitter and Facebook for example are very different services and supporting them both efficiently within the same API could be challenging. I would like to see thoughts on alternative approaches in this design document if possible.
Thanks,
Worth saying that this is a great initiative James, Chandradeep. I hope it really flies for you.
Just a suggestions but can Symbian look into adding statusnet as a supported community? It’s api is very similar to the twitter api and would be easy to implement.
I’m very interested in seeing how this progresses.
However, Nokia any many of the other Symbian-using manufacturers already have software that allows users, for example, to upload their photos to Flickr or Ovi.
Is it your intention to persuade them to stop using their existing architecture and move to this framework? If so how will your approach it?
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The unified framework looks like a great step-up. However, I’m wondering if it could get implemented into the address book (ie Xperia X10 with Twitter, and Facebook); an all-in-one social network? It would be brilliant if we could just go to a contacts name and have a tab to see his / her Facebook profile (wall, pics, info, etc.), as well as Twitter, and maybe Myspace (many others as well). This would eliminate the various apps to be open, but instead have one big one. Just putting my 2 cents.
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he unified framework looks like a great step-up. However, I’m wondering if it could get implemented into the address book .
Can we use this feature in all symbian base mobile phones?
True, still remains that -currently- companies seek justification of these efforts through some sort of metric.