Blogging Roller

Lotus knows Howard Stern

2010-04-29T07:34:33+00:00

It's cool and just a little weird at the same time to see IBM's social/collab software offerings get some praise from Jeff Jarvis via the Howard Stern show and "Howard's geek guru, IBM's Jeff Schick."

Jeff Jarvis: Now as for Lotus: In their office, Jeff Schick and a colleague generously spent a few hours giving me a tour of what they can do. I’ll concede: It’s impressive. What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet — email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging — in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected.

Only thing is, IBM had to essentially recreate the internet and all these functions to do that, both so they could integrate it all and so that it could operate behind corporate firewalls. We internet snobs make fun of that, but I understand why they do that. But as we talk about how our internet should operate — how open standards for identity, for example, should work — the irony is that we could look at the interlocked IBM platforms to see the promise of it. It’s closed, for a reason, but it shows what an open structure would look like if it operated on truly open standards. I wonder whether there’s an opportunity for IBM to offer these functions at a retail level.

...just noticed that Ed Brill has a post w/comments on this same topic: Have you been following the "why does Howard Stern use Notes" discussion?.

Month of blogging

2009-08-02T16:04:33+00:00

Crammed into one post...

After a month of blog neglect, the automatic Latest Links posts from my Delicious.com account started to pile up in my blog editor. Back in the glory days of this blog, I blogged about things instead just saving links or tweeting about them and would never have let a month go by without blogging. I realized that, by adding some commentary/opinion for each, I could turn a month's worth of links into a month's worth of blog posts and thus gain total absolution for my sin of going a full month without a post. So that's what I did.

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Category: Blogging

Joe Gregorio: Comment system review
"Comparing Disqus, IntenseDebate and Google Friend Connect." Joe Gregorio looked at commenting systems and ended up chosing Intense Debate.
Integrating Disqus and Roller Weblogger on blogs.sun.com
"I've recently updated my site to use Disqus the blog comment hosting and conversation site." Sun UK CTO Wayne Horkan explains how (and why) to use the Disqus in a Roller, with code and helpful comments from Disqus CEO Daniel Ha.
Official Google Blog: New Blog Search tools
"Feeds, Hot Queries and Latest Posts." Nice to see Google is still working on blog search despite the rumored death of blogging.

Category: Feeds

pubsubhubbub - Google Code
"A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom." Collaboration between Google and SixApart folks to allow quick notifiation of new content to feed subscribers and reduce load on feed publishers. Hub implementations are underway for AppEngine/Python, Erlang, Python and Ruby. Hmm... no Java?

Category: General

The Ryding List | Why Not?
"I have found a wealth of great things to do in Raleigh." Great list of things to do around Raleigh by newcomer John Ryding, one of my coworkers at IBM.
The Different CTO Roles - All Things Distributed
"there is no well established definition of what a CTO actually does." Of special interest to me now that I work on a CTO's staff.
Life During Wartime video from Stop Making Sense - Boing Boing
"This is the best concert movie I've ever seen." Me too.

Category: IBM

Integrating and Extending Rational Team Concert 2.0
Great guide and presentation on Team Concert development via the Jazz Server SDK. Referring to this a lot these days.
Eclipse Galileo for Mac: Cocoa or Carbon?
"Carbon is more mature and thoroughly tested, the new Cocoa implementation offers advantages and improvements." And the answer is: 32-bit Cocoa. Yep, I'm paying attention to Eclipse again. It's really the only way to do Jazz development.
Whitepaper: e4 Technical Overview
Lots of detail on the apparently massive changes coming in Eclipse e4 including the ability write Eclipse components in JavaScript and to run "existing SWT applications to be executed on web platforms such as ActionScript/Flash."

Category: Java

James Strachan: Scala as the long term replacement for Java
"if someone had shown me the Programming Scala book back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy." I'm sure that sent a lot of folks to Amazon, including me.
Google App Engine plugin in NetBeans
"With a video showing how easy it is to develop Google App Engine application in NetBeans. You can see that Hello World takes just 1 minute. :-)" Looks good and apparently it's an open source side-project. Hosted at Kenai.
Trails of EasyExtend: Java Spring - or the Biggus Dickus effect
"Looking at the API alone Spring feels like reading a parody on Java enterprise software." Schadenfreude for me; never been a fan and always thought of it as a big grab bag of insidious crap I don't need.

Category: Open Source

NYTimes.com: For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Are Getting Tricky
"Google pays Mozilla hefty fees in return. The deal accounted for 88 percent of Mozilla's $75 million in revenue in 2007." Makes you wonder about the future of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS
"The software architecture is simple: Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." Yet another Linux distro. That's cool with me; I like Linux distros.
The Java Wars, continued (Scripting News)
"most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it's still true today." Dave Winer's take on Google's Chrome OS. I think he's probably right at the moment but things are changing rapidly.

Category: Social Software

Creating a Google Data Gadget - Google Data APIs - Google Code
"This article will walk you through creating a Blogger gadget." Google and OpenSocial Gadget support for OAuth makes things easier, but it's still a PITA.
Writing OAuth Gadgets - Gadgets API - Google Code
"send mail to oauthproxyreg@google.com with the following information to register your OAuth Consumer Secret." If you want to write a Gadget that uses OAuth to access Twitter there's an icky manual registration step involved. Apparently the solution to this problem is for Twitter.com to enhance their "OAuth configuration to accept digital signatures directly from iGoogle."

Category: Sun

The end of Sun
"And that is why Schwartz isn't here, I believe. Because he genuinely loved Sun and its employees." A depressing article for former Sun employee to read, or anybody I guess. I do think there is something to this quote about Scwhartz.
Oracle-Sun Creating Churn - Forbes.com
"Suns loyal customers are defecting in droves." Not really very surprising considering the conventional wisdom, which seems to be that Oracle will gut Sun's software efforts and ditch the hardware entirely.
Computerworld Blogs: Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris? -
"Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling me that OpenSolaris developers are afraid." This article is typical of what I've seen from the author: dumb speculation of the mean-spirited variety.
Justice department extends Oracle-Sun probe
"All that's left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed." I don't there's a chance in hell that it is, but wouldn't it be fun if this was all about the Sun-Apache Terms of Use controversy?

Web development

InfoQ: Twitter, an Evolving Architecture
Brief overview of Twitter architecture, use of caching and message queue technologies.
Evaluation of Javascript Libraries
"jQuery and YUI come out on top, Prototype at the bottom." Helped convince me that, now that we have YUI, we don't really need Prototype and Scriptaculous in Roller.
"MooTools vs JQuery vs Prototype vs YUI vs Dojo revised
"Prototype is among the slowest." More justification for ripping out Prototype and Scriptaculous.

And now, back to your regular schedule of blogging, or not.

SocialSite's Flexible Relationship model

2008-11-19T10:47:21+00:00

Image by flawedartist

We're designing Project SocialSite to support the needs of any site that wishes to add Social Networking features and support OpenSocial. That means we have to be flexible.

We can't hard-code the names of different types of relationships because some sites might want to call friends "buddies" and some might call them "connections." Some sites might want multiple levels of relationships, with some relationships being considered stronger than others, like on Flickr where you have contacts, friends and family. Some sites might want to allow one-way relationships, as Twitter does with "followers," but some sites might want to require that relationships be two-way, as Facebook does.

We want SocialSite to have a Flexible Relationship model that a site operator can tweak to suit the unique requirements of her site's community. We've settled on a model based on relationship types and named levels. In this post, I'll review this new model that we have designed in hopes of getting some feedback, push-back and other good things that might help us refine our model.

I) Relationship Types

SocialSite is designed to support the types of personal relationship shown below. This doesn't include group relationships, which are handled separately.

One-way relationship: A relationship from one person to another person that is not reciprocated. For example, Fred has a relationship with Bob, but Bob has no relationship with Fred. Another example: a follower relationship as you see in Twitter.
Two-way relationship: A relationship from one person to another that is reciprocated. For example, Fred has a relationship with Bob and Bob also has one with Fred. Another example is Facebook, which requires friendship relationships to be two-way.
Mutual relationship: Fred and Bob have a two-way relationship and have agreed on a "how we know each other" message. This is more meaningful than a two-way relationship, because the two parties have agreed on some shared item of information about the relationship like "we met at band camp."

II) Relationship Levels

SocialSite can be configured to support multiple relationship levels like Flickr's contacts, friends and family levels. Users can use these levels when sharing information, e.g. share a photo only with relationships of family-level or higher. I'll explain how the configuration works, but first let's define what we mean by relationship level.

Relationship Level

A Relationship Level is a named integer index that is assigned by one person to indicates the strength of a relationship with another person. People only know the levels that that they have assigned to relationships, so one person in a relationship won't feel slighted if the other party thinks less of the relationship than they do. For example, Fred might consider Bob to be a level 2 "Close Friend" but Bob considers Fred only a level 1 "Acquaintance" relationship. Fred won't learn about this (unless Bob tells him).

You can configure the relationships levels and names supported by SocialSite via the property 'socialsite.relationship.levels'. You simply provide a comma separatied list of the I18N keys of the relationship level names, in order from no-relationship to the strongest level. Here is the default setting, which establishes three relationship levels 0=none, 1=contact and 2=friend:

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
  relationshipLevel.none,\
  relationshipLevel.contact,\
  relationshipLevel.friend

OpenSocial doesn't define differently named relationship levels like we do, so we need to do some mapping. OpenSocial has one type and one level of relationship called "friend." So, to map SocialSite relationships to OpenSocial, we have introduced the notion of a friendship level.

Friendship level

Friendship level is an integer configuration property which indicates the relationship level that is considered to be the friendship relationship across a SocialSite system. Relationships at or above this level are considered to be friends when returning data via OpenSocial APIs. Also, when you add a relationship at friendship-level or above, the other party will be notified and given the opportunity to add you as a friend too. You can configure the friendship level via the property below:

  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=2

It's good to have the flexibility to support both one and two-way relationships, but we can't assume that all sites will want both. Some social network services, like Facebook, require that friendship-level relationships be two-way, i.e. both parties must agree that they are friends. To make such a setup possible with SocialSite, we've introduced the configuration property below:

  socialsite.relationship.twoway.requiredForFriendship=true

If that property is true, then any relationship that is considered a friendship (relationship level >= friendship level) must be a two-way relationship. So, when you add a relationship at friend-level or above, the other party must reciprocate or the relationship will not be created.

III) Example SocialSite configurations

To better explain how SocialSite Flexible Relationships work, here are some example configurations that configure SocialSite to behave like well-known social network services.

-like configuration. Flickr supports relationship levels of Contact, Friend and Family. It's possible for you to consider somebody to be Family, while they only consider you only to be a Contact. Any level relationship is considered to be a friendship relationship, for the purposes of OpenSocial.

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.contact,\
     relationshipLevel.friend,\
     relationshipLevel.family
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=1
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=false

-like configuration. Twitter supports one relationship level and that is follower. Its possible for you to follow somebody that does not follow you.

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.follower
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=1
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=false

-like configuration: Facebook supports one relationship level and that is friend. Friendships are required to be two-way, so we have this:

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.friend
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=1
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=true

The default SocialSite configuration. We're considering the below settings for our default configuration. This would allow you to have contacts, with which you can share information but who are not considered friends and would not show up in your friends list or be returned as friends via the OpenSocial APIs.

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.contact,\
     relationshipLevel.friend
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=2
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=true

IV) Wrapping up...

That just about covers it, so I'm going to wrap up now. Most of the above is now implemented in SocialSite, but none of this stuff is carved in stone. So your feedback is more than welcome, either here or on the SocialSite development or user mailing lists.

CommunityOne call for papers is open X 2

2008-11-19T08:12:27+00:00

Next year there will be two CommunityOne events in the US of A; one in New York City on March 18 and the other, coinciding with JavaOne week in June 1 in San Francisco. Here's the call for papers link. The call closes on December 11.

JSPWiki vs. XWiki

2008-06-25T08:49:48+00:00

via <a href= "http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/jspwiki_and_xwiki_evaluations">Jim Grisanzio: Chris Phelan has done evaluations of <a href= "http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=64619&tstart=0">JSPWiki and XWiki for use on the OpenSolaris.org site. Based on his 32 requirements, XWiki came out on top.

On balance, XWiki wins by virtue of having better support for management, searching, page taxonomies, virtual servers, content export and language translation/localization support.

JSPWiki has slightly better support for identifying orphaned pages and accesskey support (XWiki 1.4 will have support for access keys).

Confluence was not considered because requirement #0 is "the software must be free and open source," which seems like a reasonable request when selecting software for an open source community site.

Introducing Project SocialSite

2008-05-04T09:54:18+00:00

As promised, here's some more information about the talk I and my co-speaker Jamey Wood are giving tomorrow at CommunityOne (2:35 PM in Moscone Hall E 135).

Below is the official title and blurb.

Turn your Web Application into an OpenSocial container (link)

Wouldn't it be nice if developers around the world could add new features to your web site for you? The OpenSocial API makes it possible. This session demonstrates how you can make your existing web site capable of hosting OpenSocial applications. To illustrate the process, it shows an example application and how it benefits from becoming an OpenSocial container. Attendees should be familiar with HTML, JavaScriptâ„¢ technology, and XML.

Perhaps a better title would have been, "make your webapps social with Project SocialSite" but we didn't have permission to talk about our project until very recently. Now, we're ready to talk about the Project SocialSite widgets and web services and how you can use them to add Social Networking features to your existing Java, PHP and Ruby webapps. We're not ready to talk about product plans, features or schedules but we are ready to demonstrate our work in Netbeans, MediaWiki, Portal, Roller and possibly some other apps as the JavaOne week progresses.

Here are the slides: socialsite-j1-2008.pdf (1MB PDF file)

And here's an outline of the talk:

Goals
- Understand the importance of Social Networking features in Web applications.
- Learn about the new OpenSocial standard for plugging into Social Networks.
- See how Project SocialSite's Web Services and Widgets make it easy to make your Web Applications social.
Agenda
- Social Software / Web history lesson
- Introducing OpenSocial
- Apache Shindig: the OpenSocial RI
- Options for making your sites social
- Introducing Project SocialSite
- Conclusion and Q&A
Web history lesson
- The static Web
- Blogs, wikis and feeds
- The social Web
- Facebook changes the game
- OpenSocial arrives
- Social Network as platform
- Social networking goes to work
What is OpenSocial?
- OpenSocial architecture example
- The OpenSocial JavaScript API
- The OpenSocial REST API
- Status of OpenSocial
- OpenSocial not the Silver Bullet
- OpenSocial vs. Data Portability
- OpenSocial vs. Web as Social Network
- Is OpenSocial really â€œopenâ€
Apache Shindig (incubating): the OpenSocial RI
- What is Shindig
- Apache Shindig features
- What's missing from Apache Shindig?
How do you make your sites social?
- Plugin to an existing Social Network?
- Use a hosted or â€œwhite-labelâ€ solution?
- Use Apache Shindig?
Introducing Project SocialSite
- Project SocialSite features
- SocialSite Architecture
- Project SocialSite widgets
- Project SocialSite's value adds?
- DEMO: Using the SocialSite widgets
Summary
- For more information: upcoming sessions
- For More Information: helpful links
That's all folks... Q&A

Look for Project SocialSite in the CommunityOne demo area and at the Sun booth in the JavaOne pavillion all week.

The best social software lets you be you

2008-03-25T11:35:45+00:00

Fred Stutzman: Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It's time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.

As usual, great insights from Fred. Read the whole thing.

My A list

2008-03-25T11:34:33+00:00

Here's a concept that I've been using to help me both in my blog writing and to filter all the incoming feeds, tweets, photo sharing and social bookmarking items that come in via my feed reader: my A list. It's not made up of famous folks and big blog names like Scoble or Winer or Arrington. My A list is made up of people that I know or work with and that I believe are following me in some way, reading my blog, subscribing to my tweets or working with me on a project. I've got a folder in my feed reader and my A list is always the one I read first. Sometimes I don't get much farther than than before hitting the mark all read button. And when I do blog, that folder helps remind my of who I'm writing for. "A" stands for audience.

Sweet OpenSocial preso

2008-03-04T18:56:07+00:00

From the Graphing Social Patterns 2008 conference, a sweet OpenSocial presentation with a nice overview of the emerging standard, status of the Apache Shindig project, details of the Hi5 implementation, some cute pictures of my buddy Pat Chanezon's kids and some very fine art (I think Pat forgot to credit the artist).

Social Software for Glassfish screencast

2008-02-21T16:13:44+00:00

I mentioned the Social Software for Glassfish (SSG) EA2 release before the winter break, but I never got around to posting any details. Since then some documentation has appeared, Manveen Kaur blogged it, The Aquarium too and now screen-cast master Arun Gupta has created an excellent Social Software for Glassfish screencast that walks you through the features in this very early access release. Now I don't have to say nearly as much.

Latest Links: social networking platforms and more...

2008-01-03T22:39:06+00:00

First, some social software links.

BuddyPress â€” Creating a Social Network based on Wordpress MU
"There is talk of BuddyPress and DiSo essentially being the same thing. DiSo, from what Iâ€™ve read so far, is all about distributing your user-generated content first using Wordpress as the central tool. BuddyPress is more about turning Wordpress (MU in fact) itself into its own niche social network."
Elgg: the open source social networking platform
"Elgg is an open-source social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well"
Cisco's Social Networking Strategy Comes Into Focus - ReadWriteWeb
CISCO's Entertainment Operating System (EOS) is a "platform that will be used to deliver video and other multimedia content to online community properties" with "social networking and content recommendation"
BadMagicNumber: Shipping software
"Custom vertical social network, with feed integration" - based on Java, ROME and PostgreSQL
The Blog Squad: your music. your friends. your life.
"Social music network" with blogs powered by Roller
IBM demos â€˜On Demand Workplaceâ€™
"Employees have their own profiles based on content and function. Personalization is also allowed via imported Google Gadgets and RSS feeds" with screen shots
Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
"The most-hyped site right now, Facebook, is the 'Iron Chef' of the Internet."
Micro Persuasion: Reader Integrates Google's Stealth Social Net: The Address Book
"Google Reader became the latest Google service to leverage the Gmail contact database and become more social."

And second, some feel-good PHP, Rails and Linux links.

Michael Kimsal: Continued sad state of PHP development
"with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason"
ZSFA -- Rails Is A Ghetto (2007-12-31)
"If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average."
Linux defector says RHEL zero, Sun Solaris hero
"Solaris ultimately has a lower acquisition cost because it includes features that users are likely to purchase separately in a Linux environment."

SSG EA2

2007-12-21T13:26:23+00:00

I'm supposed to be on vacation today and I'm doing my best, but I just wanted to point out that something interesting has quietly appeared in the Glassfish Update Center. Why so quiet? Well, it's an EA2 release and the emphasis is definitely on the E. I'll post some more details later, perhaps after winter break. I've still got shopping to do now and I'm supposed to be on vacation.

Interested? If you haven't done so already grab yourself a copy of the new Glassfish V2 UR1 release. Run the updatetool and install the latest EA2 release of Social Software for GlassFish.

Blog server as social networking platform?

2007-12-11T19:39:25+00:00

Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. Heâ€™s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to â€œbuild a social network with its skin inside out.â€ DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.
This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features â€” such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin â€” that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.

Latest Links: Feedsync, AtomPub for SOA, OpenSocial and more

2007-12-06T14:00:10+00:00

snellspace.com: Sync!
"Within the course of implementing several Atompub servers, the issue of â€œfeed synchronizationâ€ has come up repeatedly"
Paul Fremantle's Blog: A new kind of (SOA) Registry
"as we looked at the REST space, we kept noticing how close the [AtomPub] is to our needs"

OpenSocial - Berlin Web 2.0 Expo
Google API evangelist Pat Chanezon's OpenSocial presentation
opensocket - Run OpenSocial Gadgets in Facebook
An OpenSocial container written as a Facebook application.
Ruby on Rails: OpenSocial container plugin 0.0.1
"This is a very early version, but it is under very active development "

IBM's Carol Jones on Web 2.0 Research and Collaborative Software
Redmonk video discussion of Lotus Connections, Dogear, internal/private vs. external bookmarking
Wayne Horkan's weblog eclectic: Weblog language translator
With Roller specific functionality. Based on JavaScript and Google translation API
ZDNet.com: Social nets and identity fragmentation
FaberNovel Consulting has mapped out some trends in social networking and digital identity"
Postgres at Hi5: June 2007 user group preso
How unique features of PostgreSQL helped Hi5 scale (PDF presentation)
Scaling Java and PostgreSQL with Hyperic
Another perspective on PostgreSQL scalability at Hi5 (PDF presentation)
Skrentablog: Scaling Facebook, Hi5 with memcached
"discussion of high volume [sites] using memcached as a critical scaling tool"

OpenQabal: a social software platform w/Roller

2007-12-04T13:56:55+00:00

I'm always happy to see Roller used in new sites, projects and products. Here's an interesting new example that I've been meaning to blog for a while now. Phillip Rhodes is working on building what he calls OpenQabal a "social software operating system." The project integrates a set of social software applications, including Roller and JavaBB, via Single Sign-On (SSO), a common look-and-feel and Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC). He explains it all in an lengthy and informative blog post on the project's JRoller.com blog.

I'd never heard of SIOC before. Here's the executive summary:

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities SIOC or is a framework aimed at connecting online community sites and internet-based discussions. Currently, online communities (boards, blogs, etc.) are like islands - they contain valuable information but are not well connected. SIOC allows us to interlink these sites, and enables the extraction of richer information from various discussion services.

Sounds like it could be pretty darn useful. But then again, I spent a little time exploring the list of SIOC enabled sites with the SIOC Firefox plugin and didn't really find any examples of interlinked communities or conversations. Am I missing something?

Shindig: open source implementation of OpenSocial

2007-11-13T11:29:50+00:00

Apache member Brian McAllister, who works for Ning, has proposed a new project for Apache called Shindig. Here's an excerpt from the proposal:

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create social applications that use a social network's friends and update feeds. A social application, in this context, is an application run by a third party provider and embedded in a web page, or web application, which consumes services provided by the container and by the application host. This is very similar to Portal/Portlet technology, but is based on client-side compositing, rather than server. More information can be found about OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Shindig is an implementation of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants. A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users.

. . .

Ning, Inc. intends to donate code based on their implementation of OpenSocial. The backend systems will be replaced with more generic equivalents in order to not bind the implementation to specifics of the Ning platform.

Brian is pretty excited about OpenSocial as a light-weight client-side alternative to Portal/Portlet technology, not just for social apps but for webapps of all kind. He'd like to see both Apache Roller and Apache JSPWIki (incubating) become OpenSocial containers, despite the fact that neither product stores the social graph of user/friend relationships. Blogs and wikis are already great platforms for web development, OpenSocial could make them even stronger. Very interesting stuff.

I hadn't planned on talking OpenSocial during my session tomorrow, but I might have to add a slide or two to illustrate the possibilities.

Latest links - Oct. 30, 2007

2007-10-30T16:37:00+00:00

Some reading on Facebook and enterprise social software from my del.icio.us bookmarks collection:

Tim Bray: The Intimate Internet
Bray on Facebook: "Twitter hits that 80/20 point, bringing me that news without all the Facebook bullshit and lame groups and dorky apps and stupid ads and data lock-in. "
Fred Stutzman: The Directionality of Social Network Platforms
Stutzman on Facebook: "the ecosystem needs more than fluff, especially if we're going to start talking about the "social operating system."
Phil Windley: What's wrong with Facebook
Windley on Facebook: "social Webs will require similar attention to the structure that emerges from social activity, not nagging people about it";
Doc Searls: Too much face(book) time
Searls on Facebook: "If you're waiting for me to respond to a poke or an invitation, or a burp or any of that other stuff, don't hold your breath."
Read/Write Web: Big Vendors Scrap for Enterprise 2.0 Supremacy
"The [products] remain complex and broad in scope - which in many respects goes against the grain of simple and easy-to-use web 2.0 products."
Personal InfoCloud: The State of Enterprise Social Software
"Nearly all of the enterprise software product companies are claiming understanding of Web 2.0, but none execute well on it"

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 2 notes and wrap-up

2007-10-22T11:41:16+00:00

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/convergesouth-logo.gif" alt="ConvergeSouth logo" height="72" width="360" align="right" vspace="10px" hspace="10px" /> I'm back from ConvergeSouth 2007 now and caching up on email, blogs, etc. I enjoyed day two as much as day one. Here are my notes, quotes and paraphrased thoughts from two of my favorites sessions on Saturday, Social Networking and Corporate Wikis.

Social Networking panel

This panel was made up of Ruby Sinreich, Soni Pitts and Elisa Camahort. Ruby started off by explaining that she specializes in network centric advocacy, which like social networks is not a new thing. Online social network services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. are just just new parts of the existing social fabric. Online and off, aspects of an effective social network are the same. Those are: social ties, common stories, dense communication grid, shared resources and clarity of purpose. Good social software can support all of those. See also: Leonard Witt's post, Laurie Writes' post and Ruby's Network Centric Advocacy slides on Flickr.

Soni spoke next about how she helped businesses use social networking when she worked as a business coach. Then Elisa spoke and expressed some caution and skepticism of Facebook and social network services in general. Those thoughts were echoed in the audience discussion that followed which covered privacy issues, the creepies, LinkedIn vs. Facebook, owning your data and some good advice about managing your online identity from Wayne Sutton.

Near the end, Ed Cone spoke up about his recent articles in CIO Insight about Wachovia Bank's new Microsoft SharePoint-based 110,000 employee-strong social networking site. The articles Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise? and Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results are well worth a read if you are interested in business applications of social networking.

Corporate Wikis

This session wasn't well attended, but it was very informative and I enjoyed meeting session leader and wiki consultant Natalie Koeplinger. Natalie presented slides on wiki basics, how to select a wiki, best practices and measuring wiki success. Natalie works most with MediaWiki and Microsoft SharePoint, which now has some basic wiki functionality, just enough to make it a player even without help from Microsoft partners SocialText and Atlassian.

Wrap-up

The last session of the day was a short wrap-up and gave the attendees and opportunity to speak up about how to improve the conference. I agreed with pretty much all of the suggestions from the audience: don't end the conference so early each day, keep the how-to sessions but convert part of the conference to bar-camp format, try to get the NC A&T students more involved and establish and make use of a conference wiki. Later in the evening FilmBabble Dan and I attended the ConvergeSouth film festival, which was very good. It had to be pretty good to keep me in that horribly uncomfortable chair for three plus hours ;-)

That brings me to the end of my ConvergeSouth 2007 coverage. Thanks to Sue Polinsky, all the other organizers and host NC A&T University for a great conference. I hope to make it back next year for ConvergeSouth and BlogHer, which will be in Greensboro the very same weekend.

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 1 notes

2007-10-19T17:30:10+00:00

I'm in Greensboro today, a couple of hours away from home, attending ConvergeSouth 2007 -- "the annual tech users' conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. A combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center." Here's a summary of notes and quotes I scribbled in my notebook on day #1.

Keynote: Jason Calacanis and Ed Cone. Billed as a fire-side chat, the keynote turned out to be a pretty straight-forward interview of Jason Calacanis by Ed Cone. Ed started with some biographical questions, then moved to questions about Jason's businesses Weblogs.com and Mahalo. Along the way Jason dispensed business advice like "it takes the same time investment to build a small business as to build a big one" so "think big, but take small steps." Ed urged Jason to connect the dots between his psychology degree and his business success, which led to the observation that "most people are motivated not by money but by recognition and affiliation." I guess that's the motivation Jason harnessed with weblogs.com and the same one he hopes will lead to great human-authored search results for Mahalo.

Moving from old to new media: Dan Conover, Will Bunch and Joe Killian. In this panel-session, three newspaper writers discussed the difficulties that local papers are having making the move to the new world of blogs, wikis and social media. Some of the complaints were that newspaper hosted blog-authors do not reach out to other bloggers, don't connect to community and are rarely given enough time to run a successful blog. Newspapers are so far behind because "the culture of innovation is so alien to newspapers." That explains why "Google, the ultimate non-local entity is kicking local paper's butts."

We agree to disagree: Dan Conover, Ruby Sinreich, Chris Rabb. Despite the title, this panel was about how community and non-traditional news sites are changing the way folks relate to news. Ruby talked about Orange Politics, the site she started to help Orange County folks understand and get active in local politics. Chris talked about his site Afro-Netizen and the motivations behind it. Then the panel ranted a bit about progressive politics, the insular white-maleness of Daily Kos, the pros and cons of media "objectivity" and a variety of other topics. All good stuff; I could listen to these guys ramble on for hours.

Affiliate marketing and Web 2.0. This was an overview of affiliate marketing programs by Sam Harrelson. It seemed to cover all of the affiliate bases, but I didn't really understand the Web 2.0 tie-in. I guess I'm only marginally interested in the topic and probably should have chosen a different session.

Sociable web as a social force. This session led by Anton Zuiker and Jason Calacanis discussed how blogs and social networks can quickly bring folks together around issues, get your opinions indexed in Google right next to the evil corporation that just screwed you over and other scenarios familiar to anybody who has read the Cluetrain Manifesto. Brian Russell also talked about his efforts to use the sociable web to jump start his Carborro Coworking business. To demonstrate the power of social networks, Jason twittered his phone number, asked folks to call and we spent the rest of the session listening to his cell phone ring. Despite that, good session.

All and all, an interesting and thought provoking day -- though it did cover a lot of familiar ground for me. It's not over yet. I'm getting reading to head out to the BBQ now.

Social software and multi-media whiz kid for hire

2007-09-26T08:44:00+00:00

Local multi-media and social software whiz kid Brian Russell is hanging out his shingle as an consultant. Best of luck, Brian. If you're looking to grow an online community or upgrade your organization to Web 2.0, check out his resume and portfolio.