Blogging Roller

<img src="http://blogs.sun.com/socialsite/resource/socialduke-shadow.png" alt="Duke" title="Duke thinkin' social" align="right" />

We just announced a new Milestone 3 build of SocialSite over at the project blog. Just in time for the holiday break, we are feature complete and ready to spend the first couple of months of 2009 whipping SocialSite into a production-ready state.

We're excited about SocialSite and think we've created something with pretty unique value. We've had some big-name customers taking an early look at SocialSite and I though I can't mention any names, I can tell you a little about why they're interested. So far, the folks who have expressed interest are most excited about these aspects of SocialSite:

• Social-enables any site. We've made it really easy to add social features and OpenSocial Gadgets to any site with minimal server-side changes to the target site. It can be as easy as Google Friend Connect, but the features are backed by a Social Graph that you control.
  
• Extends OpenSocial. We provide extensions to OpenSocial APIs for friending, group and gadget management and nice gadgets that use those APIs, like our Social Network dashboard. If you're not happy with our out-of-the-box Gadgets you can easily write your own.
  
• Includes Social Graph. We've got a RDBMS-backed social graph implementation with flexibility in profile properties and in relationship types supported. So you can decide what profile properties to show and how relationships work (one-way, two-way, both, etc.).

That all sounds good, but I know how hard it can be to see the potential of a product like SocialSite without seeing it in action. We're working on some demo sites and hope to have something concrete to show in the very near future. So stay tuned here and on the SocialSite blog.