Category Archives: Social Media

Open Web Awards – What sites would you nominate for “Applications and Widgets”?

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

Still thinking about Google’s Open Social… does it truly tear down the walls of social networks? Or just make widgets work across socnets?

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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:

FAQ
Articles (including tutorials to help get started)
Documentation
Developer’s Forum

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:

Why do I have to sign in with a different username and password to each of them? Why can’t I just have a common (and secure) username/password that I use? (such as OpenID)
Why do I have to recreate my friends list in each social network? (something the “social network portability” folks are looking at)

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:

Marc Andreessen: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web – and also a screencast and screenshots
It’s Official: Google + MySpace = OpenSocial
Facebook’s dilemma: To be OpenSocial or not to be
Read/Write Web: OpenSocial: Three Big Concerns
Read/Write Web: Confirmed: MySpace Joins Google’s OpenSocial (includes link to video from Scoble)
Wired: Salesforce and LinkedIn: OpenSocial Means Better Business-Centric Apps and Services

Stay tuned for more…

Technorati Tags: apis, applications, facebook, facebookplatform, google, opensocial, socialmedia, socialnetworking

Joining Voxeo in part to put social media into action…

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Over on my Disruptive Telephony blog, I posted about who my new employer is – Voxeo, and you can read the details over there. Here, though, I thought I’d just mention a couple of items.

First, one of the exciting aspects of my new role is that social media is an explicit part of my job description. It’s not all I’ll be doing… or even the primary thing I will be doing (although it will be one of the primary tasks initially)… but it will certainly be part of the role. Some of the work will be to set up external blogs and podcasts for Voxeo focused in a couple of different areas. More on that as it evolves. Other parts of the work will be to look at using social media behind the firewall for internal communication and capture/retention of corporate knowledge. It will be both fun and challenging and I’m looking forward to it.

Second, I think it’s interesting to note how I wound up with the job. They found me through my blogging. They said in part that they found my blog through the post I wrote about how the phone no longer matters, which wound up getting some good distribution and links within the blogosphere. Once at my blog, they saw my posts about being let go from Mitel and the type of roles I was seeking… and it happened that they had been talking about bringing someone onboard to do those precise type of roles. They hadn’t posted a job description but were considering this… and contacted me as a result of seeing my posts about being available. I haven’t really distilled that all down into specific “lessons” yet, but it is interesting to me to see that the experiment of being very open in blogging about the whole employment transition did in fact work for me. There’s also a lesson there about writing provocative posts that are done as deliberate link-bait to try to bring in readers to the blog. It all seemed to work… at least this time. It was definitely an interesting experiment.

In any event, that’s the story. Again, you can read more about my new employer over on my Disruptive Telephony blog.

Technorati Tags: danyork, voxeo

This conference will be photographed and uploaded! (aka life in the always-on(line) world)