OpenSocial

Google has introduced a standard for the development of social networking applications, its called OpenSocial. Standards had names like SOAP, BPEL, WSDL and UDDI up to now. The challenge with Web services is not developing the technology but in agreeing on the business semantics.

Did the term ‘Item Shipped’ mean the same thing to every company?

Google’s strategy with OpenSocial is to take the emphasis away from Facebook (which people are getting bored of, by the way) in the same way that Web services where about taking the emphasis away from Microsoft.

The ‘semantics’ have converged with naming conventions in the case of OpenSocial. But surely, the effect of OpenSocial – if successful – will be to muddy the waters when it comes to social networking.

Then again, perhaps OpenSocial will allow small communities to exist in their personalised community while mixing with the rest of the world if they want. Make your own mind up, this article from Computerworld is a starting point.

It gives rise to the question is social media a solution in search of a problem? It will only sustain us when we are all sat behind computers all day or they are wired into our brains.

Social work

There is lot of talk about the abscence of professional tools and applications in the latest social networking sites. I have been thinking about applying the concept of ‘social’ in the context of ‘social media’ to the work place. This may have been discussed or it may be being discussed. It stemmed from a conference call in which I took actions and circulated them to the participants. Well actually, I sent them to my team mate to review and then asked her to circulate them. Now, if instead of circulating them she posted them to the Web and sent us a feed. We would then accept and they would go into a centralised To Do List, which collects the actions from all of your calls and meetings. Everyone can view everyone else’s actions. When one action is the first step before another, as many are, the team member that completed the first step would automatically initiate the action as ready in the To Do List of his colleague. With the same application, you would have a Twitter like application for teams to exchange pleasantries or share ideas and thoughts. And a status bar would broadcast a descriptive of your current project (if it is of significane and/or lengthy enough to require a status bar update). Imagine a team member is called into an urgent/unplanned meeting and unable to complete a must do task in his to do list before its deadline. This task would pop up on the screens of the team mates with an option for them to accept, delay or reject. If the action is rejected then an automatic chat room pops up for the team to discuss the resolution. Does anyone think there is something in this at least in distributed teams.