I thought the social network space was filled up by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, kind of like how online bookstores have been dominated by companies led by Amazon. Sure, there are new social network competitors, but we grok the beast. But just when LinkedIn seemed to define the boundaries of social networking, Instagram comes out of nowhere and suddenly we understand less than we thought. Far from set in its ways, of social networking is being rocked by waves of game changers. In an article in Fortune, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes serves up 7 contenders to watch in 2013.
A project of the Elgg Foundation, Elgg is a free open source social networking engine licensed to users under the GNU Public License v2. The REST Elgg API allows developers to integrate Elgg and offer new apps for it. To give a sense of its size, 1,646 plugins have been created so far by the user community, with nearly 3 million downloads. Examples of plugins include blogs, forums, social bookmarks.
Quantified Self, “a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking,” requires tapping into massive amounts of data for its very existence. Members meet in an online community, and in person through small groups and a larger conference. The goal of any meeting is to learn, develop, and refine methods for collecting personal data in hopes to generate an effective response to the data. At Quantified Self forums around the world, “[i]ndividuals tell their stores of using data to better understand who they are and how they interact with the world around them.” says Singly.
California-based Zurb is turning the dry science of usability on its head by using Twitter and Facebook APIs to socialize user testing.
User testing has long been the domain of usability experts who utilize carefully controlled focus groups, panels and one-on-one interviews to assess software and websites. Zurb’s suite of socially connected testing products let anyone quickly and easily create a test and gather insights from Twitter followers and Facebook friends.
Users of the Buffer app and Buffer API can now schedule status updates to LinkedIn, in addition to Twitter and Facebook, from a single publishing interface. Buffer, the web-based service that allows its users to write tweets and status updates ahead of time and then schedule their posts throughout the day, has extended its service to include the professional networking platform LinkedIn.
MySpace, the social network heavyweight looking to get back some of their old momentum is making a big splash with developers this week. On one hand, they announced an innovative, open platform for real-time stream access and more. But will that be overshadowed by a complete lack of care for the community that built applications on top of Imeem, the music service MySpace acquired and quickly shuttered?
Your code could help people get to events on time, or ease coordinating their schedules. Google opened some of their Calendar interface to developers as a gadget container, meaning developers can build features on top of Google’s popular service.
Google this week released a new API for Friend Connect (our new Friend Connect API Profile), its relatively new service that enables social networking features to be easily added to any existing web site (utilizing copy and paste code that leverages OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial). The API allows developers to tap into some of the core features of Friend Connect.
OpenSocial recently had its first year anniversary, and the specification and APIs are growing in popularity. And now, courtesy of the OpenSocial team, several new client libraries are available for leveraging server-to-server APIs. This gives developers easy access to building OpenSocial apps in languages other than JavaScript.
The Facebook platform team celebrated the platform’s one year anniversary with another big move: going open source.
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