Late to the Party
October 31, 2007 – 6:44 amI’ve come late to the social networking party — I mean, I have a social network, I just hadn’t webified it until recently. But the more I think about future directions for DrProject (assuming funding materializes some day), the more I realize that software project management portals are really just specialized social networking sites. The network might be imposed if you’re in a company, and you’re more likely to share bug reports than movie preferences, but at their core, both exist to connect people with shared interests to one another in a slightly-less-than-realtime way.
Which makes Google’s announcement of its OpenSocial API interesting. This is for the also-rans (as the announcement says, Facebook and MySpace are big enough that they can define their own APIs), but anything that makes it easier for people to combine DrProject with other tools has got to be a good thing. Now, if only more web-based blog readers would support OpenId…
3 Responses to “Late to the Party”
I completely agree with you Greg though I have to say that I do think you’ve had a webified social network for quite a while, your blog; it’s revealed by the commentary, for example, when you write demo camp or education-related posts. The ‘new’ online social network scene is just extending it to the closer personal relationships so that the spectrum gets filled in. The advantage of Facebook and Google offering APIs now is that internet culture and software practices themselves lend to standardized setups, it makes it that much more viable for someone to buy the new creations out or use their service as a cog in a bigger machine. It’s also becoming so fashionable that being an expert is no longer a requirement, people are now able to do a bunch of things online that doesn’t require a technical guru, especially with the mashup builders (not to mention the work being done on semantic mashups from MIT at the same time). With OpenId, I believe it’ll take on, but only when they can create a better website! Granted the concept is correct and desireable, but marketing is most of the battle, especially when it comes to getting the general population to drive it into the heads of those who are technologically in the know, until then they won’t see the necessity.
By Shahan on Oct 31, 2007
How come OpenID isn’t enabled on your blog?
By Shahan on Oct 31, 2007
As to the age bracket. The newest trend is 50+s taking over the Facebook… See, e.g.,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/11/01/dlchums01.xml
By Serguei on Nov 5, 2007