Google’s Open Social
The blogosphere is abuzz with the initiative announced last week by Google — Open Social — a system that allows application developers to create applications that work across all of the social networks.
This means that our new service for managing conferences –– Swift (in development) –– can be integrated into any social network using the Google API. This is good for us but also good for users in that your conference information can be shared across social networks.
And as Devin writes on his Quantum Creative blog, Google has developed a new Social Network in partnership with Carnegie Mellon, called SocialStream. SocialStream allows users to “seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.”
SocialStream is a research project and it is worth reading about the research and user studies done by the team to put it together. Here is a good articulation of what people need in terms of a social networking service:
* To access information with little effort
* The ability to communicate with all contacts, regardless of the sites or services they use
* To keep informed about someone through updates about their recent activity
* To have someone perform a task on someone else’s behalf
* To feel in control of what they are doing and their information
* To not have to go through redundant steps for routine tasks
* To have easy and understandable sharing
To get a good feeling for how SocialStream works, you need to download the demo movie.