Socializing the Web
May 13th, 2008 | by Brad King |For the last year, I’ve been working with a computer science student at Northern Kentucky University to create a content management system that would enable users (not site owners, but the people who get online) to create buddy lists that would:
- allow for internal bookmarking
- allow for dynamic generation of site content based upon those bookmarks
- import rss feeds from other media outlets
- leave notes for friends who want to know what you thought about the article
At the time, we thought it was a pretty interesting idea, creating this CMS that was agnostic to existing technologies while incorporating some of the more social aspects of the web.
But it turns out, we aren’t the only ones thinking about this.
Google will be holding a developer conference in San Francisco at the end of the month to discuss its Google Friend Connect initiative.
Enter Google Friend Connect. This new service, announced as a preview release tonight at Campfire One, lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials.
You’ll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And quite simply, you’ll be able to do things together.
It’s quite exciting to see this particularly as its tied in with the OpenID structure, which has a decent chance of becoming the first ubiquitous reputation system for media on the Web — and the opportunities for newspapers is astounding.
I know with our CMS — CuJo — we’ve already looked into launching two developer communities in order to build new modules for the system (and lock down some of the more loose ones we kludged together).
This service would certainly ease the strain on Steve, at least initially, as we sough to create an integrating sharing platform for information.
