Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 4:41 PM
If you don't know about or use the shareable-prefs API, you can safely stop reading now. If you do, we want to let you know that we'll be deprecating this API and feature.A little over a year ago, iGoogle added shareable-prefs, enabling gadgets to share state across multiple users' pages. Since then, iGoogle has rolled out support for OpenSocial, enabling a collaboration model that is more tightly integrated into an application's design. Given this, along with the low adoption of the shareable-prefs feature in gadgets, we've decided it's time to deprecate the shareable-prefs feature.
In the next few weeks, iGoogle will remove the UI elements for shareable-prefs, preventing any new gadgets from implementing this feature. A few weeks later, iGoogle will break the links between these gadgets entirely, at which point, the gadgets will behave as if they were never shared at all. However, both users will retain the data in their preferences. The gadgets should continue to function in every other regard, but gadgets that wish to share data between users should implement OpenSocial's requestShareApp (paired with appdata, or a 3rd-party storage mechanism).
If you have any questions about these changes, please let us know in the iGoogle Developer Forum.
