Joseph Smarr at Web 2.0 on the New “Open Stack” « The Real McCrea Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s chief platform architect, and de facto leader of the Portable Contacts initiative, gave a talk today at the Web 2.0 conference in New York. Entitled “Tying it all together; Implementing the Open Web,” it was a rallying cry for developers to jump in and get working on the new “open stack” of OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, XRDS-Simple, and Portable Contacts. See converage from attendees Kris Jordan and Steve Kuhn (who quips about Joseph, “Dude talks fast”)! Joseph asserted that the industry has now come together around a common vision for the future of the Social Web — a vision that abandons the walled garden model in favor of a new services layer that interconnects social hubs with the rest of the web. And, indeed, that is the vision behind the strategies we see from Google (with Friend Connect; which launched for real today), Plaxo (with Pulse), MySpace (with Data Availability), Yahoo (with Y! Like this: Like Loading...
Facebook to provide OpenID support for users (and financial support for OpenID) » VentureBeat Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has so far asked third-party developers to access its user data strictly through its own proprietary standards. But the company has said it intends, eventually, to make this data more openly accessible, and it’s taking a step in that direction today by announcing it’s joining the OpenID movement. OpenID lets you sign into a web site using your username from another site. So when somebody goes to a site they’ve never signed into before, and that uses OpenID, they’ll presumably be able to sign in using their Facebook identity. It’s not clear if Facebook will let users sign into Facebook using identities from other sites. The social network has also joined OpenID’s board of directors and will provide financial support to the industry-backed foundation going forward. Indeed, open standards advocate and OpenID board member Chris Messina reveals the complex politics going on around the standard in this post about the news:
Visualize your LinkedIn network with InMaps « If you’re a LinkedIn user, you already know the power of your professional network. What if you could visualize what your network looks like? Would your connections form clusters or groups? Wouldn’t it be great if you could see the way all your connections are related to each other? Even be able to identify the elusive hubs between your professional worlds? Now, you can! InMaps is an interactive visual representation of your professional universe that answers all of the above questions. Here’s how it works: your map is color-coded to represent different affiliations or groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, college classmates, or industries you’ve worked in. Bigger names represent people who are the most connected within that specific cluster or group. Here’s where it gets interesting. Just like snowflakes, no two networks are the same. We hope you take some time visually exploring your network. To access your InMap, go to
Web 2.0 LMS Opportunities and Obstacles: Exploring OpenSocial, OpenID,and OpenCourseWare in NIXTY at e-Literate This is a guest post by Glen Moriarty, PsyD, for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Glen, who is CEO of NIXTY, has served in several executive and academic positions. He co-founded and led Scholar360 for several years. He is also a licensed psychologist and educator who has taught at the doctoral level. He has published and presented on eLearning, psychology, and technology, and is a member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the American Psychological Association. “Don’t fight the Internet.” Learning management systems (LMS) have solved many problems by providing a way for people to learn in an online context. The above quote attributed to a CEO of a Major LMS company is not a real quote. My paper will explore the opportunities in moving to a Web 2.0 global learning environment. First, OpenSocial is explored as a common way that developers can build applications that promote relational and social learning. Google+ Comments
Interview: Cow Clicker Yields Ruminations On Social Gaming's Tense Battle Lines Academic, author and game designer Ian Bogost is a little bit worried that his latest game, Cow Clicker -- a simple Facebook title simply about clicking on cows -- might receive more attention than anything he's done to date. If that turns out to be the case, it'll be an interesting turn of irony, the sort that motivates the sometimes-controversial designer: this is because Cow Clicker is a satire that asks players and developers alike to examine the explosive popularity of Facebook games. The game, Bogost tells Gamasutra, was initially conceived as an alternative to a straight lecture presentation he was asked to give at an NYU event; with only ten minutes to speak, and (as usual for Bogost) "a lot to say", why not show instead of tell? Cow Clicker was intended to present the four issues that Bogost says "concern" him most about Facebook games: "enframing, compulsion, optionalism, and destroyed time," described in detail on his blog post about the title. Going Beyond Concept To Practice
Main Articles: 'OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web', Ariadne Issue 51 Printer-friendly version Send to friend OpenID [1][2] is a single sign-on system for the Internet which puts people in charge. OpenID is a user-centric technology which allows a person to have control over how their Identity is both managed and used online. By being decentralised there is no single server with which every OpenID-enabled service and every user must register. One key function which OpenID supports is the ability for a person to have 'single sign-on' across multiple OpenID-enabled services. OpenID grew primarily out of the blogging community where there was a requirement for people to take the identity used to write their own blog and use it when commenting on other people's blogs. Figure 1: OpenID Relying Party adoption as seen by JanRain's MyOpenID.com Although OpenID started with the blogging community, it is beginning to see adoption in technologies like the Ruby on Rails framework, the Zend PHP framework, and the Django Python framework. That's the theory anyway.
Open Source Social Networking Platform. Elgg 1.8.19 is the latest and recommended version of Elgg. Elgg is available under a dual license, GPL Version 2 and the MIT license. The plugins are only available in the GPL release and so have been removed from the MIT release. Download: 1.8.19 MIT version Elgg 1.7.22 includes an important security fix. It is the recommended release if using Elgg 1.7. If you are looking for somewhere to host your Elgg powered network, we are putting together a list of providers who have added Elgg hosting to their services.
OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol. Promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation, it allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as Relying Parties or RP) using a third party service, eliminating the need for webmasters to provide their own ad hoc login systems, and allowing users to login to multiple unrelated websites without having to have a separate identity and password for each.[1] Users create accounts by selecting an OpenID identity provider, and then use those accounts to sign onto any website which accepts OpenID authentication. The OpenID protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. Moreover, neither services nor the OpenID standard may mandate a specific means by which to authenticate users, allowing for approaches ranging from the common (such as passwords) to the novel (such as smart cards or biometrics). Adoption[edit] Technical overview[edit] Logging in[edit] Identifiers[edit] People[edit]
Locals Online - For hosts of neighborhood e-lists, placeblogs, and community social nets Home: E Welcome to the Locals Online - For hosts of neighborhood e-lists, placeblogs, and community social networks. Join over 340 peers working to connect local people online. Read the Introductions and then add your own. This online community includes "hosts" of neighborhood e-mail lists, place blogs, community web forums, building or block-level social networking groups, hyper-local online communities, and online journalism sites designed for active community participation. Our wiki directory on social media in local public life presents the field as does the Pew Internet and American Life Project's Neighbors Online study. Support for Locals Online provided by the Knight Foundation Through the end of 2014, this online community of practice will receive special online facilitation support from E-Democracy.org as part of the knowledge sharing strategy of their Inclusive Community Engagement Online initiative. Locals Online is the place to land to share lessons across our field. Share:
HOW TO: Use Facebook Social Plugins on Your Website This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. While many companies' early social marketing efforts were limited to social media sites such as Facebook, most are now eager to build social capabilities into the rest of their marketing efforts and turn their customers into brand advocates at every touch point. One of the easiest ways to make your online presence more social is by adding Facebook social plugins to your website. There are many different Facebook social plugins to choose from — here are four of the top plugins for business and tips on how and when to use them. 1. The Facebook Like button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click. You can include a Like button next to any piece of content on your site, from a product listing to an article to a video. 2. 3. 4.