Possible Partners and Interested Services

[Werner Keil]

Based on Antoine's suggestion to speak with social networking services, I add this new thread.

Sorry for the German page, but the really interesting piece is the diagram about the Top 7 Social Networking Services by traffic in the US:
http://www.futurebiz.de/artikel/halbwertszeit-von-geteilten-links-stumbleupon-schlagt-facebook-twitter/

Although the survey is primarily about links and "likes" from and to these services, it's worth considering to look at who might benefit from more standardized APIs and ways to exchange such links. It's not necessarily the top 7 in all cases, sometimes, e.g. in domain-specific social services like travel, healthcare, etc. you won't find potential partners and users in such lists, but they nevertheless could be more interesting for and interested in Enterprise Social Media.

[Antoine Sabot-Durand]

For those who missed German lesson here is the Google translate version :

http://translate.google.fr/translate?hl=fr&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.futurebiz.de%2Fartikel%2Fhalbwertszeit-von-geteilten-links-stumbleupon-schlagt-facebook-twitter%2F

Interesting : The first time I ear about StumbleUpon.

Antoine Sabot-Durand

[Werner Keil]

Although the JSR is in the scope of SE/EE while this separation exists, initial thoughts came from Java ME Leads. This is a whitepaper by the Open Mobile Alliance with interesting aspects:

http://www.openmobilealliance.org/documents/110601%20OMA%20MSN%20Whitepaper.pdf

Both OMA and the W3C group “Federated Social Web Incubator” it quotes (by now, the incubator seems to have ended) are worth to keep an eye on or try liase. Especially for those of us who may be involved in either of them, or consider doing so.

[Werner Keil]

This is a Portlet based solution aimed at Universities and similar educational users:

http://www.jasig.org/uportal

It recently got a mobile client for iOS and Android, all Open Source, too: http://www.jasig.org/umobile

Since many of the first Social Network services including Facebook as the most popular started on university campuses, there's strong reason to believe, some services they provide have common use cases with social networks. Plus large portions already use JCP standards like Java Portlets.

See all of you who are at DevoXX tomorrow,

Werner

[Werner Keil]

At least for Orkut Google sounded somewhat interested at DevoXX earlier this week.
Not sure, if they'll really join this group, but some Google APIs with or without Google's actual participation are worth keeping an eye on. Like the New version of the Google Calendar API! Lots of improvements: see our blog post for details. http://t.co/7fAf7c3K

Interesting fact by Orkut is, that unlike Orkut, Google+ is NOT Open Social compliant and has no urge to do so any time soon.
So much for Google and Standards;-/

[Ryan Baxter]

Take a look at this post by Paul (Google) about OpenSocial and Google+.  Based on his comments Google+ will align more with OpenSocial in the future.
http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-and-gadgets-spec/browse_thread/thread/1187241df6759a9a

[Werner Keil]

Last week's Eclipse DemoCamp in Kaiserslautern (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_November_2011/Kaiserslautern) highlighted an important aspect of Social Media APIs, especially by Twitter sometimes more relevant to Enterprise and Social-BI than the client facing ones:
Streaming API (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api)
Among other interesting topics like EclipseSource replicating an entire Twitter-like "Munsters" style application based on OSGi and Eclipse RAP, one of the local hosts of the event presented this:
Whow is a webplatform, which refers its data from a tweetranking. The webapplication follows a certain number of twitterers (based on data from an external application) and evaluate their tweets according to relevance. This produces a ranking of the hottest news at the moment, which also can be personalized. By a theme explorer the user can add more interesting topics and travel back in time per timeline.
All this has been realized in the backend using SMILA.

Their so far mostly academic work on Semantic Filtering of Social Media Streams using Eclipse SMILA looked very exciting. And includes mostly Java-based libraries even companies like Google were interested in before. They would be happy to standardize some of those mechanisms. Most of them already are part of Eclipse SMILA: wiki.eclipse.org/SMILA/Glossary

Whether or not, some of these would be in scope of one Social JSR or rather something else, I'm happy to discuss. To some extent the mechanisms serve BI and BPEL, but their work is focused on Social Semantics and BI, so there's certainly a bit of both.

I'll invite the lead of this project to the group, soon, too.

Werner

[Werner Keil]

Does anybody, from Apache or other Group members have an idea, if CDI Extensions like Seam Social might also be affected or become part of Apache DeltaSpike?
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/DeltaSpikeProposal

In any case, it confirms, true and vital Open Source Communities like JBoss and Apache work together and use synergies in projects like this one. Given, especially CDI and Seam based solutions like Seam Social are related, it fuels hope for synergies with projects like Shindig, too.

Werner

[Antoine Sabot-Durand]

Seam Social will indeed become part of DeltaSpike. The dev team (me and myself) will move to Apache to continue developments.

Antoine SABOT-DURAND

[Werner Keil]

Thanks, that's good to hear for required parts like RI or TCK which are then also probably best located there. Synergies with other Apache projects like Shindig will certainly be easier that way;-)

Is there any effect on the project infrastructure, e.g. will some of the projects leave GitHub for another repository?
I'd like to know as I (and anybody else who wants to help;-) plan to update the JSR proposal soon, also trying to fine-tune those paragraphs where necessary. At the moment, most of them should refer to java.net, where that was better elsewhere we should mention it.

Werner

[Werner Keil]

I haven't heard too much about Viadeo before, but it seems, in some parts of Europe or Asia they've been rather popular. And now also aim for Russia.

Check out the API: http://dev.viadeo.com/

[Werner Keil]

This is another Top 7 list of Social Media Services, especially focussed on Enterprise Social:
http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/social_networking_private_platforms/232300493

[Werner Keil]

From a former committer to the SocialSite project (on java.net) I heard of another Apache Incubator project for Social Media and Mashups:
http://incubator.apache.org/rave/

Interesting, and it shows, there's so much fragmentation even under the Apache umbrella, as it may be inspired by SocialSite, but doesn't seem to use any of Shindig either.

The committer base is a little smaller than Shindig, not sure, how far advanced it is in the incubator? Maybe those participating in DeltaSpike could also reach out and see, if there's any synergy between the two projects?

[Werner Keil]

Well it does in one case: inline widget rendering, like http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SHINDIG-1402

[Ryan Baxter]

I am in contact with at least 2 of the committers for Rave.  They are local to me and I talk to them pretty frequently.  We meet in person every once in a while.  As you saw, they are leveraging Shindig.  While Rave supports other 'widget' types, like W3C widgets, they are mostly focused on OpenSocial gadgets.

[Werner Keil]

Thanks, the W3C focus also makes it interesting for another soon to be incubated Apache project around Device Definitions. Not sure, if you heard about that, but some of the lead authors are very interested in OpenDDR, too.

[Werner Keil]

As Google is killing support for Semantic Social APIs like SocialGraph, the question arises, whether they are irrelevant or just don't made enough money for Google?;-)

XFN  http://gmpg.org/xfn/ 

and

FOAF http://www.foaf-project.org/projects

[Ryan Baxter]

Anyone have any statistics on what Google APIs devs use the most?

[Johan Vos]

An API initiated and controlled by a single company has less chance on adoption.
That is one of the reasons I believe in the JCP :)

- Johan

[Werner Keil]

Well, IBM is also JCP (EC) Member, but these efforts seem to happen on its own, too:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/ibm-aims-to-formalize-the-social-enterprise-movement/66704 

Fortunately there are also people at IBM, some on this list who invest efforts into Open Social;-)

[Werner Keil]

Johan,

You hit the point as this latest move in France against Google's iron grip over Search and related Social services shows:
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/01/24/french-startup-twenga-files-the-tenth-anti-trust-complaint-against-google-in-europe/?utm_source=twitter.com/eskimon&utm_medium=twitter

This could be one of the first Social Media related lawsuits of that kind, and a clear indicator, that even Open Social largely controlled by Google is probably not the complete answer to the need for truly Open Standards in this sector.

On the other hand, some of the Open Social players and partners (at least MySpace was once among them, Facebook not really AFAIK) now go against Google with its own, likely Open algorithms:
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/01/23/twitter-facebook-myspace-engineers-use-googles-own-algorithm-to-build-a-better-social-search/

[Werner Keil]

This is an interesting approach to Social Networking for Professionals:  http://geekli.st/about

Hard to say what they'll do, but it sounds like a cross-over between Twitter and maybe LinkedIn kind of services.

Thanks Raj for spotting it:-)

[Werner Keil]

While talking to people at Social Media Week Hamburg, somebody mentioned Jive:  http://www.jivesoftware.com

I believe I might have heard about them before. And they are not only providing those Social services to leading IT and Mobile customers like T-Mobile, Swiss Re, etc. most of them are either JCP (EC) Members or at least known to have a large stake in Java. So either Jive's products are based on Java and Java-based frameworks or at least must work closely with Java in these customer projects.

I may try to reach out via other JCP members or colleagues, but if anybody else has been in touch at conferences, please feel free, to do the same.

[Ryan Baxter]

Jive is actually heavily invested in OpenSocial and Shindig.  One of their employees is the president of the OpenSocial foundation.  I work with them from an OpenSocial perspective regularly....

[Werner Keil]

Thanks for sharing. 

I spoke to XING today at Social Media Week and they mentioned certain limitations they found in using OpenSocial. Much of it related to Privacy or local (European) legislation, maybe at least of interest to consider some during the OpenSocial 3.0 design and requirements. Unless it's supposed to be a US-lead initiative only, with privacy and data protection laws of US and a few other countries only?;-)

Especially the new EU Comissar Nelly Kroiss and her initiatives for that kind of stuff seem relavant, not just for Germany with that respect.

Parts may affect the Identity JSR, but some parts may also be relevant to OpenSocial or Social Java.

Werner

[Werner Keil]

Maybe for Contacts and partners mostly, similar to "FriendOfAFriend", etc.

http://blog.xamarin.com/ 

[Werner Keil]

Hi,

While looking for a nice place to stay during my new project in Denmark, I came across this portal:

http://www.airbnb.com 

The UI may be a slight rip-off from Foursquare, or they simply use the same web framework and widgets, but they have one of the best tablet-friendly mobile UIs I've seen in a long time. Even a cost range slider that works reasonably well on mobiles, and its only inconvenience is, that the widget itself keeps saying "$" even though you switched to your local currency (could use a bit of JSR-354;-D) The site itself is fully multi-currency otherwise and also available in German.

The service started in San Francisco (where else) and has a German office in Hamburg (where else ;-) 

Pity I didn't know them while at Social Media Week, nor did I notice any session, but Denmark isn't very far from Hamburg, so if they are interested to have a chat with me/Java Social, that could be arranged at some point.

Werner

[Werner Keil]

This page seems a bit old, and G+ may have overturned Orkut (except in Brazil maybe;-) by now, but those Top 20 Social Sites and Services are probably worth keeping an eye on:  http://www.businessinsider.com/these-19-social-networks-are-still-bigger-than-google-2011-7# 

Well I assume except MySpace which could currently be where G+ used to be back then?;-D

[Werner Keil]

http://mashable.com/2012/05/12/startupsworld-at-work-7/ 

[Werner Keil]

Some more niche Social Networks:

http://mashable.com/2012/06/13/niche-social-networks-2/ 

[Werner Keil]

Funny, this company though not a trace mentioned of OpenSocial here seems like an IBM Social partner, too;-)

http://www.spigit.com/solutions/products 

Came across them as Rational FocalPoint has a connector to Spitit or vice versa.

Some of their underlying core frameworks do seem a bit like Agorava...