impl.emented» OpenSocial http://impl.emented.com — tracking the Web Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:12:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 The War of the Universal Login http://impl.emented.com/2009/01/11/the-war-of-the-universal-login/ http://impl.emented.com/2009/01/11/the-war-of-the-universal-login/#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:02:33 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=62 OpenIDBeginning of December last year, the war of the universal login heated up considerably with the simultaneous launch of Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. Soon after, MySpace joined the party with MySpaceID.

Google Friend Connect is about making it easy to add basic social features to a site with the help of Google Gadgets and OpenSocial apps. Login is possible via a Google account, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID.

On a Facebook Connect enabled site, users can login via their Facebook account, connect with friends on the site, invite friends and publish status updates back to Facebook.

MySpaceID offers similar services as Facebook, but builds on the open standards OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial. They have also partnered with Friend Connect, to make it easy to add OpenSocial apps to a site.

Of the three, Google and MySpace are considered more open and friendly, as they support OpenID for example, whereas Facebook is considered proprietary and evil. Sadly enough the evil side is destined to win this war, due to its exceptional growth rate and simplicity for users. Hopefully there's still a hope for OpenID and that the good guys will win in the end.

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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2009/01/11/the-war-of-the-universal-login/feed/ 1 News and Noise [Best of May '08 #3] http://impl.emented.com/2008/05/19/news-and-noise/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/05/19/news-and-noise/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 21:15:23 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=32 This week turned out interestingly too (May 12-18 2008):

  • Robert Scoble has been blogging actively recently, and has an interesting post about news and noise. As he says: "The news is in the noise," which makes places like Twitter and FriendFeed interesting for the makers of news. The news items appearing on Google News and Techmeme are filtered out of the noise, which makes these news sites essentially noise free, and in some sense less interesting. Google News only tracks large well-known sites with multiple editors, which further reduces the noise, and also blocks individual bloggers from being covered. Getting on Techmeme is still feasible for an unestablished individual blogger, but it requires several "votes" by elite bloggers, as Scoble explains. On Techmeme's item selection process, Robert writes:

    TechMeme: watches signaling from key members on Twitter and Google Reader. If enough people who are on the TechMeme Leaderboard Twitter and share an item on Google Reader you’ll see the item pulled onto the page.

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  • Calais, the semantic markup service, is out with an improved version that recognizes terms from areas other than business, like media, music, entertainment, sports, medicine and healthcare. Calais also announced the release of WordPress and Drupal plugins.
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  • Robert Scoble also has a recent post stating 9 reasons why FriendFeed won't go mainstream, a few of them being: "Normal people don’t like noise", "FriendFeed doesn’t work well on mobile phones", and "Comments get fragmented, even inside FriendFeed." Honestly, Robert in a companion post states 9 reasons why FriendFeed will go main stream.
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  • The OStatic blog, one of my recent subscribes, tips about the Google Doctype project, an "open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications", with resources on Web security, DOM manipulation, CSS and more.
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  • Yahoo! Search's open platform SearchMonkey is released to developers and site owners. Developers are allowed to create small applications that enhance the info about the URLs returned from a Yahoo search (but are not allowed to reorder the search results). The applications trigger on the returned search URL, e.g. I could build an application that enhance the search results from this domain (http://impl.emented.com). The structured data available to developers for enhancing the results come from core and semantic data gathered by the Yahoo crawler (called Slurp), special data feeds submitted by site owners to Yahoo and custom data services that you could create yourself.

    Once developed, the applications are to be used by people searching the web with Yahoo Search. Obviously, an application that only triggers for a site which seldom show up the search results, will have difficulties to attract users.

    Site owners are allowed to contribute with structured data about their site in a few different ways: By submitting Atom feeds to Yahoo, by using semantic markup or by creating custom web services.

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  • Google Friend Connect was released this week, and caused some controversy about what the service really is. For example, Marc Andreessen thinks it is not a competitor to Ning, but "a mechanism that provides the embedding capability for Open Social gadgets to be used all throughout the web -- with the added benefit that with a Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget, the user gets her social context anywhere she goes." Robert Scoble on the other hand thought that Friend Connect could be a competitor of Ning. The Friend Connect site says that the service provides "a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing." The member gadget is said to provide core social features for the site, like sign-in, invite and activity showing to other social networks, member browsing across social networks, and on-site friend connect. A site owner can also easily add OpenSocial applications to the site.

    Thus, an existing site can easily be socially enabled, and as such potentially compete with a Ning social network aimed at the same audience. Also, someone considering to start a new social network now has the choice of building an own site and using Friend Connect, instead of using Ning. Building an own site is of course somewhat more complicated, but it gives a much greater degree of control. So, in conclusion I think that Friend Connect could compete with some of Ning's audience, and also provide an alternative for some social network builders. Note that for really serious social network builders interesting in implementing OpenSocial, there is still the option of using Shindig.

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  • Jeff Atwood criticizes the frequent use of XML, due to its verbosity and poor human readability. Alternatives could be YAML or JSON.
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  • RSSmeme, an aggregator for Google Reader shared items, has released an API, which makes it possible to get all kinds of specialized feeds out of the service.
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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/05/19/news-and-noise/feed/ 0 Yahoo Semantic Search and YouTube Platform [Best of March '08 #2] http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/16/yahoo-semantic-search-and-youtube-platform/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/16/yahoo-semantic-search-and-youtube-platform/#comments Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:39:55 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/16/yahoo-semantic-search-and-youtube-platform/ John Musser at ProgrammableWeb scored three of four interesting posts this week (March 10-16 2008):

]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/16/yahoo-semantic-search-and-youtube-platform/feed/ 0 Authentication, Social Network Trends and IE8 [Best of March '08 #1] http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/09/authentication-social-network-trends-and-ie8/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/09/authentication-social-network-trends-and-ie8/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:44:20 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/09/authentication-social-network-trends-and-ie8/ Interesting posts this week (March 1-9th 2008):

]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/03/09/authentication-social-network-trends-and-ie8/feed/ 0 February Highlights II: Cloud Computing, Social Gaming and the Social Cloud http://impl.emented.com/2008/02/21/february-highlights-ii-cloud-computing-social-gaming-and-the-social-cloud/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/02/21/february-highlights-ii-cloud-computing-social-gaming-and-the-social-cloud/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:19:02 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/2008/02/21/february-highlights-ii-cloud-computing-social-gaming-and-the-social-cloud/ Here are the past week's most interesting posts:

  • Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds – Alex Iskold
    Alex makes a brief comparison of cloud computing vs. LAMP, and lists a few scalability issues with the LAMP approach. He does not mention any potential problems with cloud computing other than occasional outages.
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  • Tom Coates: Web of Data – Richard MacManus
    Tom Coates gives a presentation at Webstock and talks about a "web of data", which is where "data sources and services are the center of the Web, rather than pages." Examples are Twitter and Flickr. He recommends opening up your data, the main reason is a "network effect", new services can build on the data.
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  • Game On: Zynga and SGN Battle For Social Gaming Developers – Erick Schonfeld
    Social gaming networks are growing. The benefit for a developer to join a network is increased visibility of their application. The Social Gaming Network, SGN, provides an API for their gaming hub, where developers can add their games and leverage the "gaming graph".
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  • Crude Android Prototypes Unveiled – Daniel Langendorf
    Pictures of early prototypes of Android mobile phones, mostly circuit boards, displays and solder.
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  • Study: 6% of People Online Contribute 50% of Display Ad Clicks – Marshall Kirkpatrick
    Further, they have a low income and are "more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites."
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  • The Social Cloud – Kevin Marks
    Kevin Marks has a video up of an interesting presentation he gave at the recent Geneva LIFT conference. A few quotes from the presentation:

    The Social Graph API puts this cloud around finding me and finding my public friends on the web. That means we can assume that that is there and it is abstracted that stuff away, which means we can assume that these public connections that we have already asserted and made on the web, can be discovered and can be reused in other places.

    ... OpenSocial, that puts a cloud around social networking sites, and the details of friends, the details of people, the details of the actions they do and data you store.

    So by the concept of a cloud, he means that something just works, and we, as developers or users, do not have to think about the details of the implementation or how it works. From a developer's point of view, OpenSocial enables the concept of a Social Cloud.
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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/02/21/february-highlights-ii-cloud-computing-social-gaming-and-the-social-cloud/feed/ 0 February Highlights I: The Social Graph API, Web 3.0, MySpace Platform and more http://impl.emented.com/2008/02/12/february-highlights-i-the-social-graph-api-web-30-myspace-platform/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/02/12/february-highlights-i-the-social-graph-api-web-30-myspace-platform/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:25:31 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/2008/02/12/february-highlights-i-the-social-graph-api-web-30-myspace-platform/ Let's start out this blogging task by listing a few interesting and thought-provoking posts I've come over the last week. Hopefully, it will be a recurring theme of this blog. The inspiration for this kind of link post comes from blogger Steve Rubel, who frequently writes "links for [date]" posts, with a short description and tags.

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