OpenSocial Update: Major New Features

I haven't had to the time to review, the specs, but from the announcement,it appears that some really important features have been added (emphasis mine):

• Gadgets can now be container-aware, if necessary, to build tighter integration.
• Developers can easily have apps that let users navigate between different surface, such as  profile and canvas pages.
• Tighter permission controls for reading the Viewer object from the datastore as well as an optional end-user prompting mechanism.
• Introduced opensocial.makeRequest, which replaces _IG_FetchContent, allows both POST and GET, and includes an option for OAuth signing or authentication
• Cleaned up the Activities class: removed the Stream class, removed the summary field, and removed folders (which were deprecated in 0.5 anyway)

The "makeRequest" method seems like a big step forward. Its recognition that interaction with 3rd party sites needs to be (at least) fully RESTful and not just a pull-oriented GET.

And, of course you notice OAuth in there!!!