Opera and Facebook widget contest

Opera Software company regularly holds various competitions and Russian developers from time to time are among the winners, receiving well-deserved prizes and gifts. True, there is always a slight, but very annoying inconvenience: developers from other countries constantly make up pretty strong competition, often depriving our competitors of prizes. Today, I am pleased to announce the start of a new competition, jointly held by Opera Software and Facebook, which guarantees that only our people will get all the prizes: as part of the first in Russia Facebook Developer GarageThe contest for developing Opera widgets for this popular social network called “Opera Facebook” has started, and only programmers from Russia and neighboring countries can participate in it. Under the cut - the conditions of the competition and a list of motivators.

Competition purpose
The main task that we want to achieve with this joint event is the emergence of powerful and convenient opera widgets that allow Facebook users to discover new possibilities for using this social network, get additional comfort, or even completely reconsider their style of working with this portal. Whether it turns out or not depends on you: we do not limit the flight of developers’s imagination and do not set additional conditions other than traditional and, in general, quite logical: widgets should not contain code whose freedom of use is limited by copyright or patents, at the same time, widgets must fully comply with current web standards.

By the way, it should be recalled that opera widgets can be made universal - not only for a computer, but also for mobile devices. Of course, such work is guaranteed to get an extra point in the piggy bank. Also a little advice: it would be nice to develop an initially multilingual interface (at least Russian and English), as it is possible that the widget will be in demand among a global audience and will receive official status on the Facebook portal.

Dates
The competition has already started and the acceptance of work will be carried out within a month - until October 15, 2010.

On October 16, the top three final widgets will be published on widgets.opera.comand the stage of their public evaluation will begin: everyone will be able to install these widgets, test them in real "field" conditions and render their verdict by voting on the page of the tested widget.

On October 31, we will summarize - not only the rating and the total number of downloads will be taken into account, but also the uniqueness of the idea, the beauty of implementation and functionality. Winners will be announced

on November 1 - more precisely, prizes will be distributed among the three finalists.

Prizes
For the first place - the Nintendo Wii game console.
For the second and third places - HTC smartphones.

Useful information
All entries must be sent to ilyas [at] opera.com, indicating “Operation Facebook” as the subject.

Useful links:
Online technical documentation
Opera Widgets SDK
Technical articles on widgets

Good luck and look forward to your work!