« October 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
Catching up on some blog reading I came across Chris Brogan's great post "Consider Your Media-as-Business Strategy" and yesterday's "Three Untapped Values of Social Networks". If you are working with social media (or thinking about it...) and aren't reading Chris's blog, I would strongly suggest you give it a chance. He's a great writer with great insight.
Technorati Tags: chris brogan, socialmedia
As I've written here (and on Disruptive Telephony) in the past about the need for improved management of our online identity, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of the Internet Identity Workshop on Monday - Wednesday of next week in Mountain View, California. We need to get it right. If you are out there in the area and can attend, I'd highly recommend it. (I won't be there as I'll be up in Vancouver at IETF 70.)
What sites would you nominate for "Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".
Mashable.com doesn't yet have a post out with specific guidance, but in the information that they have sent to us to date they have indicated that this is basically "anything else"... social networking sites for communications professionals, anyone? hobbyists? specific fan sites?
Feel free to nominate any kinds of social networking sites that you think might fit this broad category. Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.
Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)
Technorati Tags: openweb, openwebawards, open web awards
What sites would you nominate for "Social Search" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".
As noted in the Mashable.com post on this category:
Despite the never-ending barrage of Google news and the dominant market share of the top four search engines, dozens of startups think they can do a better job at helping you query the Web. In fact, we rounded up a list of more than 40 of them a few months ago, and I personally test drove six so-called “people search engines” back in July. After checking out our prior coverage and maybe giving a few social search sites a try of your own, pick your favorite and make a nomination!
What sites and services do you like best? Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.
Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)
Technorati Tags: openweb, openwebawards, search, socialmedia
What sites would you nominate for "Applications and Widgets" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".
As noted in the Mashable.com post on this topic:
We see a lot of startups enter the social bookmarking scene on a regular basis, many of which are never to be heard from again. But a few new interesting entrants have emerged this year in the battle to take on the likes of Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. A few notables include Mixx, who offers a pretty neat social news/start page mashup, Thoof, who takes a collaborative approach to social news, and Streamy, who has garnered a lot of attention for its flashy Digg rival, though still in private beta. Meanwhile, anyone can now quickly and easily create their own social bookmarking sites using services like Pligg and coRank. Are any of these worthy of an Open Web Award, or are the big boys still the best?
What sites and services do you like best? Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.
Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)
Technorati Tags: openweb, openwebawards, search
What sites would you nominate for "Applications and Widgets" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".
This category is by far my favorite and I'm looking forward to seeing what sites people nominate. As noted in the Mashable.com post:
Late last year, Newsweek predicted that 2007 would be the year of the widget. Boy, were they right! Aside from the usual buzz that surrounds the likes of Google, Facebook, and MySpace, this year was dominated by stories of companies coming out of nowhere with distributed applications to become household (well, at least Web 2.0 household) names. In fact, even USA Today has caught on to the trend, highlighting the rise of companies like iLike, Slide, and RockYou in today’s edition.
While flash widgets for things like slideshows and scrapbooks were the big success story in the first half of the year, much of the focus in the space shifted to Facebook applications this summer, with developers building tools ranging from the trivial to attempts to turn the social network into a serious business tool. Then, just last month Google threw its hat in the ring with the announcement of OpenSocial, an effort to align virtually all of the other major social networks against Facebook in application development.
In short, this should be a wide open category with dozens if not hundreds of companies that feed into the social networking ecosystem to consider nominating.
What applications and widgets do you like best? Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.
Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)
Technorati Tags: applications, mashups, openweb, openwebawards
What sites would you nominate for "Mainstream and Large Scale Networks" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".
As described in this post on Mashable.com, this category is for the large networks:
In last year’s social networking awards, Pete wrote “… we think that Facebook will continue to grow strongly in 2007.” That has certainly been the case, as the network has exploded in popularity since opening up to everyone that wants to join and launching a developer platform. However, recent concerns over its new advertising system and privacy issues have critics questioning the long-term prospects of the site. Meanwhile, MySpace remains #1 in terms of traffic, with other network such as Bebo, Hi5, and LinkedIn all sporting impressive growth in the past year.
Who do you like best? Facebook? LinkedIn? MySpace? Others? Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.
Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)
Technorati Tags: openweb, openwebawards
As readers are aware, I've been writing both here and over on my Disruptive Telephony blog about "mashups" and how the future of communication belongs to application platforms, open standards and such. Mashable.com has long been one of the main sites I've followed to stay up on what is happening in the rapidly evolving world of mashups and applications and so when they announced the creation of the OpenWeb Awards I thought I'd join in helping promote the awards. There are now 30 blogs joining in, including many that are much more popular than I am and whom I read all the time! As the site indicates, the Open Web Awards are about:
The Open Web Awards, hosted by Mashable.com, are the first ever online, open collaboration awards event, to recognize the best online communities representing web 2.0. This unique approach to an online event is about communities, so we've taken a collaborative approach to finding a winner, enabling other blogs and websites to take part.
I have committed to soliciting nominations and votes for the following categories (FOLLOW THE LINKS to nominate a site in a particular category):
1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
2. Applications and Widgets
3. Social News and Social Bookmarking
4. Social Search
13. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks
And I will shortly be posting notes about each of those soliciting nominations. PLEASE POST YOUR NOMINATIONS IN THE POSTS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL CATEGORIES so that the Mashable folks can easily find the nominations.
Thanks for your participation and assistance.
Technorati Tags: mashups, openweb, openwebawards
Earlier today I participated in a audio book review of "WordPress for Dummies" with FIR co-host Neville Hobson (I am a weekly "correspondent" into the FIR podcast). The podcast is now online on the FIR site and I will also be cross-posting the podcast notice below as well. It was fun to do the interview with Neville and overall we both were very positive about the new book. (You'll hear my one main point of criticism, which was not so much with the content but with the way it was presented.) If you are working with WordPress - or thinking about it - I would definitely recommend you check out this book.
NOTE: Neville cross-posted the podcast notice on his blog and the book author has responded with a comment.
One of the most popular platforms for creating and managing a blog is WordPress. From its origins in 2003, WordPress has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
A new book, WordPress For Dummies, has just been published, with explanations in plain English about WordPress and how to use it.
Written by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress for Dummies covers blogging basics, choosing a hosting solution or setting up a host, developing blog content, syndicating blog posts with RSS, launching a specialized blog (including podcasting, photoblogging, mobile blogging, and videoblogging), and even earning revenue. It includes help on every aspect of installing and using WordPress, illustrations from real-world WordPress blogs, step-by-step tutorials on key topics, and insights from bloggers who use WordPress.
FIR co-host Neville Hobson and FIR correspondent Dan York discuss their take on the new book, looking at various aspects of the overall content, and concluding with their recommendation about the book.
Download the review here (MP3, 12.6MB, 27mins 37 secs), or sign up for the FIR Book Reviews RSS feed to get it and future reviews automatically. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, sign up for the full RSS feed.
Listen to this podcast now:
Voxeo
If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
Podsafe intro music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.
WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Paperback, 384 pages
Published in November 2007
ISBN: 978-0-470-14946-1
Available online now from Amazon.com and other outlets.
Technorati Tags: blogging, danyork, fir, nevillehobson, wordpressfordummies, wordpress, wordpressmu
Longtime readers may have noticed that my pace of blogging has decreased of late. Don't worry.. I'm not fading out. I've just been sucked into the vortex of the WordPress MU implementation I'm doing for my new employer, Voxeo. The good news is that there is light at the end of the tunnel... and it's not an oncoming train! Seriously, the implementation has gone very well and soon I'll be able to provide some links to what I've been doing.
I'll also finally be able to get back to doing a bit more writing... my queue right now of posts to right is incredibly huge!
Over on his blog, Jeff Pulver wrote a great post: 'Today's unsolicited email: "Still looking for a PR firm/publicist?"' that is worth reading if you are in the PR field. I have to agree with Jeff's various rules:
Especially his Rule #1. It continually amazes me the high degree of "spam" that I get from PR firms who obviously haven't taken 10 seconds to look through my site to see what I cover. I've just wound up on some email distribution list and so as a result I get spammed.
Sadly, I have no way to know how many good PR people out there did take a look at my sites, determined that I was not appropriate and therefore didn't pitch me. All I typically see are the many spam pitches and every now and then someone who actually does it right. I have one in particular that I'm planning to highlight here at some point because she did the pitch so well!
Anyway, Jeff's post is worth a read. What do you look for in a PR firm?
Technorati Tags: PR, jeffpulver
A conversation at 5:30am this morning:
"Daddy, what is this letter?" (holding up a puzzle piece with a letter on it)
"It's a letter 'g'".
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is. It's just a lowercase letter. A small one."
"But where is the squiggle at the bottom?"
It turns out that she was talking about the loop at the bottom of the lowercase letter "g" that appeared in one of the books she has been learning words from. Looking up the letter G in Wikipedia did in fact bring up this interesting (to me) little bit of typography. If you look through the various letters, the lowercase "g" is really the only case I know of where we have common usage of a very different letter from a typographic point-of-view. (Well, another case might be the uppercase W.) Many if not most letters have common variations with and without a serif (the line on the top or bottom of a "stem" or main "stroke" of the letter, for those not accustomed to typographic terms). But I can't really think of another letter that varies as much as the lowercase 'g'. A quick survey of some of my daughter's books shows that the g does have a "squiggle" or loop at the bottom of it in some common fonts.
From the Wikipedia article:
The modern minuscule (lower-case) G has two basic shapes: the "opentail G" and the "looptail G" . The opentail version derives from the majuscule (capital) form by raising the serif that distinguishes it from a C to the top of the loop, thereby closing the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The looptail form developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a loop. The initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper loop. The looptail version became popular when printing switched to "Roman type" because the tail was effectively shorter, making it possible to put more lines on a page. In the looptail version, there is a tiny flick at the upper right which in typography is called its "ear".
As I looked through our daughter's books and also looked online, it seems that all the more recent books seem to use the "opentail G" without the loop/squiggle. The particular book where she pointed this out was an older Richard Scarry book ("Best Little Word Book Ever") and the same font seems to be used throughout the "Golden Books" series of "classic" children's books. It was also present, though, in other books.
On one level, it was an interesting discussion to have with my daughter (although we could have had it a bit later in the day, really) and an interesting pointer to me to notice the typography in books she is looking at... because she will notice it.
It was also interesting to think about how resources available to parents have changed as well. When confronted with the inevitable "I don't know why it's different", I simply jumped online, went to a site (Wikipedia, in this case) and looked up the info. Fascinating world we live... and that's the world my daughter and her peers will be growing up in!
Technorati Tags: typography
For those of you in Ottawa, this Sunday will bring you PodCamp Ottawa from 10-4 at the wonderful National Arts Centre. I'm not all that sure how good the "no chairs" thing will go down (if I were still up there, methinks I'd be bringing a lawn chair!), but there seem to be some good people already lining up to go. Hope you all have fun! (Me, I'll still be recovering from turkey...)
Technorati Tags: podcampottawa, podcasting, podcamp, socialmedia
The folks over at Mozilla have now released the first beta of Firefox 3. More information can be found here:
It is of course posted with the warning that this is for development and testing purposes, i.e. don't install it on a machine where using Firefox is critical. Some reviews are already appearing: ZDNet and CNet. I'm sure there will be more articles about it in the blogosphere as the days go on.
Being a chaser of bright shiny objects, I've naturally downloaded it and will be giving it a try myself. I'll post here my opinions as I start using it in daily work. What about you? Are you going to try it out? (Or wait for another beta or release?)
As I've been discussing, I'm in the midst of evaluating various pieces of software for Voxeo's blog portal. When I last wrote, I was debating between WordPress MU and Lyceum... I've now made the decision to move ahead with WordPress MU into the next stage of pilot testing. Why? Really one word...
Tags
As noted in the announcement of Wordpress 2.3, there is now native support for tags in addition to categories. It happens that I very much like the use of tags on a whole number of levels. Lyceum looks to be an excellent multi-user blogging platform, but its current release is based on the older WordPress 2.0.11. WordPress MU, on the other hand, is based on the current WordPress 2.3.1 release. (I'll note that somewhere in the site I saw that the Lyceum folks are working on a Lyceum 1.1 release that will be based on WordPress 2.3.1, but I need to move ahead now with the blogging project.)
That's the latest... stay tuned for more as I plunge into all the customization and configuration.
Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging, wordpress, wordpressmu
If you blog and care about the theft of your content, you should really read this post from the "Lorelle on WordPress" blog: "Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content".
Like most bloggers, my text has been lifted/scraped/stolen... whatever terms you want to use. In a couple of particularly egregious cases, I did actually make the effort to contact the thief and in one case got it taken down. (A marketing company that seemed to be setting up bogus blogs for SEO purposes and populating them with content from various RSS feeds. The CEO was a bit surprised/embarrassed when I called her up on the phone and basically said "Why are you stealing my content?") But I don't have the time to do that with any regularity. I could probably spend all day doing that and have about as much effectiveness as banging my head against a wall. I'd rather write new content and do all those other things that I need to do each day.
So I was a bit saddened to read of this newest development in the constant war between the spammers/sploggers/thieves and the content producers. Now we have people who will take the content of our RSS feeds, mash it up/remix it with synonyms, and put it out in a probably unreadable form... for SEO or whatever purpose they may be paid for.
I do wonder if these people can honestly look at themselves in the mirror in the morning... but yes, they probably can... as far as they are concerned they are finding new and innovative ways to service their clients. There's just this minor little matter that they are stealing our content to do so....
As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of my tasks in my new role with Voxeo is to create a "blogs.voxeo.com" blog portal for the blogs the company will create. Given my interest in open source, I've been investigating options there for a "corporate blog portal". Why open source? Primarily because I'm a huge control-freak and I want to be able to control all aspects of the portal, even if it means diving deep into source code. So my first inclination is to investigate open source options and then if I can't find something there that meets my requirements, I'll move on to commercial software.
On first-glance, though, it would appear that there are two viable open source options out there:
Both options look good. Both let you use the zillion WordPress plugins out there. Both provide front-end portals. Both can be customized to the nth degree. Stay tuned for more analysis... and if any of you reading this have used either of them, I'd appreciate any insight you can offer.
Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging, lyceum, voxeo, wordpress, wordpressmu
Consider these posts from a fictional Twitterer:
Man, this 60-inch plasma display looks totally awesome on our living room wall!
@<user>, what's even better is the incredible sound coming through our Bose home theater system - it so totally rocks!
And some time later, this partial exchange:
@<user2> - take <highway> to <city>. Get off at exit 9 for Main Street.
@<user2> - coming down Main St take the 2nd left onto North St. 3rd house on right. Blue with yellow shutters. Can't miss it.
And some more time later, this on a Friday:
Goodbye fellow twitterers! We are all going away to <city far away> for the long weekend. See you on Tuesday!
Could it get any better for a thief?
They have been given a juicy target... they have been given precise location (which often is also included in the user's profile- or enough is there that a thief could use other public information such as phone directories to get an address)... and they have been given a window of opportunity in which they know no one will be home. What more do they need? Well, maybe a tweet like this:
Darn. Alarm system is offline and company says they can't repair it until next week.
And I've seen people tweet things along those lines - and I've had to wonder what people are thinking.
Or perhaps they aren't really "thinking"... caught up in the fun that Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Facebook status updates can provide, it's easy to just post whatever random thoughts come into your brain. Without thinking of whether or not there are ramifications for the safety of themselves or their property.
Now the same can be said for blogging. I've certainly seen people blog all sorts of details about their activities that, in my opinion, they probably shouldn't. But "status updates" are so immediate... more like IM messages, except for this wee minor detail that they are potentially searchable via Google and easy to find publicly (depending upon the service).
How great is this for thieves? If I'm a smart thief all I need to do is do some searching for Twitterers (or users of another service) in a given area, aggregate their RSS feeds and just keep watching and reading for a while. Sooner or later I'll be able to identify some targets and then I really just need to wait for some window of opportunity to appear. If I'm a smarter thief I probably aggregate blog feeds and other information as well.
Of course, the reality is that if a thief is this smart, he or she is probably involved in much more potentially lucrative endeavors such as identity theft, phishing or other online criminal activities. Still, there is some potential for thieves and others to read your status updates and gain information that can help them know when they can target you or your property and what value might be there. I suppose I can summarize it as the pithy:
Think before you tweet!
Seriously, though, there are undoubtedly some "Status Safety Tips" or "Tips for Safe Twittering" that we can come up with. I'll offer some suggestions here:
What other suggestions would you have?
At the end of the day, security is balancing act. Odds are that there probably isn't (yet) a ring of thieves in your neighborhood sitting there monitoring Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce, etc. Odds are that you can post about whatever you want very publicly and there will be no issue. The benefit you gain from engaging with your community... for developing those relationships... may far outweigh any safety risks.
But I do think it is something we need to think about. The amount of information we choose to share publicly is our choice. With every post, we make that choice whether we realize that we are doing so or not. I choose to be very public, but also do think about what I post. I know others who are more private with their information. It's a choice.
What is your choice?
Technorati Tags: facebook, jaiku, pownce, privacy, security, status, twitter
Thanks to a tweet from Donna Papacosta, I learned of this great video from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada called "Privacy and Social Networks":
The terms of service the speaker references is the hideous ToS of Facebook, which I discussed previously and continues to make me concerned about what information I upload into Facebook.
Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy, socialmedia, socialnetworking
Longtime readers will know that I have been a huge fan of Microsoft's Windows Live Writer offline blogging editor (see what I've written about it). In fact, I have to say that WLW is the ONLY application that I severely miss now that I've moved to MacOS X (sorry, neither ecto nor marsedit yet measure up to WLW for me) and I'm actually considering running Parallels just to be able to use it. To me, it is that good.
So I was delighted for all the Windows bloggers out there to see the tweet from Neville pointing to the Microsoft blog entry indicating that "Windows Live Writer 2008" is now available. You can download it now.
If you have never used an offline blog editor and you are on Windows, do check it out. I've been using offline blog editors for most of the seven years I've been blogging and once you start... you'll never want to go back.
To all you Windows users, enjoy! Me? I'm thinking of firing up Parallels to give the new release a try...
Technorati Tags: blogeditors, microsoft, windowslivewriter
Per my last blog post on the topic, I've now added my "Design Suggestions for a Corporate Blog Portal" to The New PR Wiki. There is now a "Corporate Blog Portal" page which includes the suggestions I've blogged about here, as well as some examples and a placeholder for links to software.
Feedback would be definitely appreciated! What do you think about these suggestions? Are there other items you think should be on the list? Do you have examples of corporate blog portals that you thought were really well done?
Please feel free to leave suggestions as comments here on this blog post, email me, or make the edits directly in the wiki if you have the password. If you don't and want to edit there, please feel free to email me.
Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging
I was somewhat amused when local TV station WCAX started using Twitter... I first learned of it when they started following my twitter feed. At first I didn't follow them in return (purely because I am getting a lot of Twitter followers and I like to check them out before just following them), but yesterday I decided to start following them purely to have another source of local news.
Today, I saw a great example of how Twitter could be used for local alerts:
Now, working in a home office, this doesn't really impact me, but I did call my wife who was out doing errands and let her know to avoid the highway. Tomorrow, I'll be heading up to FacebookCamp Montreal and this type of message could help me decide which of the exits I would use to get on the highway.
Nice to see... and now a good reason for me to continue following WCAX's feed.
There's also an irony here, in that I don't watch TV, so this Twitter feed is really my only exposure to WCAX and their brand. (Outside of obviously knowing that they are around.)
Technorati Tags: twitter
Question for readers - do you have any examples of "corporate blog portals" that you think are done "right"?
One of my tasks with Voxeo will be to create a "blogs.voxeo.com" portal with some of the blogs that we are looking to launch. Obviously, I'm looking to learn from what others have done and come out with something that works well. Back in April, I posted the second round of my "Design Requirements for a Corporate Blog Portal" and that naturally serves as a background for my development, but I'm curious for feedback six months later... are there more items you think should be added to the list? (For instance, I'm thinking that a "tag cloud" would be a worthwhile addition.)
Do you have examples of companies you think did it well? I listed Cisco and Sun in my post, and a commenter suggested Edelman... and then there's the rather minimalist Microsoft MSDN portal. Do you have other suggestions?
Also, if any of you have built corporate web portals, do you have any suggestions for software? Anyone done it with open source solutions like Wordpress? Or have you used commercial software? Any and all suggestions would be welcome.
Thanks in advance if you have any suggestions for either corporate blog portals or software.
P.S. Ultimately, my aim is to capture all this inside of The New PR Wiki so that others can learn from this exchange.
Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, blog portals
Are there any readers of this blog in the Burlington, Vermont, area who want to head up to Facebook Camp Montreal on Wednesday? I'm planning to go and given that the event starts at 6pm (and goes to 10pm) I'm figuring to start driving up around 2 or 3pm to avoid rush hour. Normally it's only about a 1.5-2 hour drive, but I've always found the traffic in the late afternoon to be horrid in Montreal.
Anyway, if there are any Vermonters reading this who want to head up, I wouldn't mind the company. Please drop me an email or call (802-735-1624).
P.S. If you don't speak French, no worries... neither do I. (Outside of the 20 or so random words I picked up from living in Ottawa for 5 years.)
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebookplatform, facebookcamp
Unless you have been under a rock for the past few days, you should by now be aware that Google released an API called OpenSocial. There is a new Google blog that had the announcement, which included this:
OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language.
The list of OpenSocial partners is quite extensive... basically everyone in the social networking space except Facebook, but also including other companies such as Salesforce.com and Oracle. Having the big players like MySpace and LinkedIn is definitely key. Google has also provided a wealth of information:
I find it all intriguing. There is a great amount of talk in the blogosphere about how this "tears down the walls" of social networks... and it does - in one aspect. It seems to me that this is really a direct shot at the Facebook Platform in that it gives application developers the ability to create applications that work across multiple networks. So from the point-of-view of a developer, this truly does open up the world of social networks. You can now write an app that is not just restricted to the confines of Facebook's walled garden, but instead can run in any of the other social networks out there (that support OpenSocial).
So it solves part of the problem out there in social networking... and it looks like quite a compelling way to do so. I'm certainly going to be reading the tutorials and experimenting with sample code.
But please let's remember that there are other issues with the walled nature of social networks. For instance:
OpenSocial lets apps be created that work across multiple networks. I commend the folks behind it and supporting it. But let's please remember that it solves only one part of the overall "open" issue.
I need to really play with it more before I can comment further. In the meantime I'm capturing here a number of links related to OpenSocial that I have found useful:
Stay tuned for more...
Technorati Tags: apis, applications, facebook, facebookplatform, google, opensocial, socialmedia, socialnetworking
Note that neither Voxeo nor VOIPSA have any connection to this weblog and any opinions stated here are entirely Dan's.
