There was no escape, he iChatted it to me (I normally just ignore his tweets because I’m terribly busy) but this time he’s hit a good’un! Brazilian viral marketing agency and general media monsters Gringo have produced a nice little self promo (worth a visit if the director of your company insists) but the thing that really caught my attention was their international swear box…They accept submissions from around the world for all the down and dirty street lingo you know will one day end up scoring you a free beer. Or a bitch-slap. Here’s the social widget, because it’s all about social widgets nowadays. Obviously.

Record your own

How many people have spent the last two weekends educating 13 to 19yr olds? We can solidly promise you that it involves throwing a lot of tennis balls, big pens, huge post-its and it’s collated together with a workshop rule, “no throwing the laptops”. Yup, that’s right. We’ve been on the BBC Blast tour.

BBC Blast, which tours the UK in a HUGE bus, has a fantastic mission; give young people an opportunity to experience and learn a few skills and in a fantastic environment.

We pitched a workshop, inspired by the Thought Den Industry Day, called Flash Games – Social Network Wigetry! An intro session aimed at getting creative minds thinking, explaining and ultimately using Flash to produce their own piece of work. Their own version of…

So the last few weekends we’ve been playing ice-breakers, brainstorming, inspiring creative photography, taking abuse and finally herding twitchy mouse fingers through the Flash interface.

It was an immense amount of fun, but ultimately, a lot of kids left feeling like they could confidently use flash to handle some of the more basic interface tools. Hurrah! The plan worked.

Big thanks to the amazing Holly Edwards from RIO who was running the shin-dig, Cathy the content lady, who taught me how to juggle in her lunch-break and to all the kids who weren’t a pain in the….

Sometimes we’ve hit a road-block when we’re trying to make Flash talk to the External Interface in our MySpace applications.

The Flash is having a great time and is more than happy to call Javascript with ExternalInterface when it wants. But when Javascript wants to chat back… beep beep. “Please leave a message”.

Flash appears to ignore the call, and leaves Javascipt in an error state and needing ice-cream.

To help you avoid that little relationship problem here’s the fix to the problem. Add the following to your code,

System.security.allowDomain(“*.msappspace.com”);
System.security.allowDomain(“*.yourdomain.co.uk”);

Flash’s Sandbox is set to divert all calls by default and blocks any chat. However as soon as you’ve added the allowDomain. Flash shouts, “HELLO!”, and it’s all back on again.

One big happy social networking family.

We’ve been playing around with MySpace Application Surfaces to get Flash AS2 to talk to a Javascript Interface. It’s been a long day….

Here are our findings for any other Flash & MySpace Developers.

- ExternalInterface + SWFObject + iFrame will not work. Do not spend 4 hours refreshing your browser and re-testing. It will not work. There are also no tutorials to sort it out either.

- getURL is just plain dirty. Don’t do it.

The final solution we settled on is, don’t use SwfObject. Just have a plain Object/Embed tag. Then External Interface can talk to all the relevant parties.

Download our MySpace files (put into the Canvas Surface) and see what we’ve done.

So we’re staring to develop a MySpace application with Team Rubber, which is all good news. Basically it means we get to play with a new technology and they get to have their cool application benefit from the power of a social network.

However, not all is rosy. At the first step we’re presented with the choice, “Do you want to develop with OpenSocial or MySpaceID?”.

What? Which one do we choose! Surely like every other social platform, api or online do-hickey you just sign-up, ignore the instructions till it breaks then code like the wind?

It’s not even like the bullet points help you make a decision. Both offer their positives, but not weighted against each others.

To be honest why can’t we just have both? Surely, we could just use OpenSocial as a base and then add on any MySpaceID stuff as it goes?

Nope. One or t’other.