Open Social

[p@]

Google have released a new Social Networking standard. I haven't had
the chance to play with it yet, but I think MeAggregator should
support it on both client and 'server' side. Not only will it enable
other people to interface with us more readily, but I suspect it will
ease many connectivity issues we may have.

[Bethgranter]

Hello from the SPLASH project!

Yes Open Social looks really interesting, we'll have to consider doing
whatever we do in a way that fits in with that I think.

As to your project in general, it's mainly about uploading resources
(e.g. photos, documents etc.) to a place that users can access from
any computer, and share with other people that they choose, right?

As oppose to reusing items (e.g photos, blog posts etc.) which are
already online?

We are just about to make our main technical decisions, i.e. whether
we are going to use Elgg and adapt it to our needs, or start from
scratch, maybe integrating NetVibes Universal Widgets... or maybe
not...

Regards,

Beth

http://splashproject.blogspot.com

[p@]

Hi Beth!

We are more about helping the user organise all "their" stuff, so that
they can re-use it as they desire, including sharing it with others,
whilst controlling who can see what. We are hoping that one mode of
operation will be that people can share directly peer-to-peer, and
another will be server based. The two should mix and match quite
well.

The engine behind it all is based on folksonomies. Tagging content to
allow you to manage it better.

For example (taking something a little different to the usual web
pages ideas) you should be able to tag a period of time as "Party" and
then build a relationship between that time and your house, and tag
the friends you want to come with "Party" too... then they should be
able to see that there is a Party at your house, and compare it with
other things they have tagged for the same period of time...

You could also use it for forming adhoc social networks - by defining
a tag which relates to, say, a seminar topic, and then adding people
and resources to the same tag. Coupled with times on the resources,
the client software can then thread the data into a forum style
conversation, and keep resources (tagged as 'static' or similar)
separately.

So... well, we aim to do everything really!

[Bethgranter]

Ah OK, wow sounds quite complicated!

So if you had already made a Facebook event for your party, would you
do what you suggested above and create another event within
MeAggregator, in order to invite people who aren't on Facebook for
example?

What I'm trying to figure out is, would you bring in items from
Facebook and Flickr etc. as well as or instead of uploading items
within MeAggregator?

[p@]

The plan is that we should be able to integrate sufficiently well that
a Facebook event would get added to your MeAgg, and similarly (but
this one I am less sure about getting to work) you should be able to
'push' a MeAgg event to Facebook.

So, the idea is that you can use your existing apps (Facebook, Flickr
etc) and have access to them through MeAgg, also pushing them back out
to other apps as you require, including to your friends via MeAgg
itself.

That's the plan anyway :-)