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OpenSocial meets iBuild: Create your own social gadgets

As revealed tonight in TechCrunch, Google will be announcing OpenSocial, a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data - “who I am“)
• Friends Information (social graph - “who I know“)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff - “what I am doing“)

LimitNone will be part of the Google launch with our new iBuild product.

iBuild is a socially-aware, gadget-based application builder.

Here is a simple scenario that illustrates some of iBuild’s potential for do-it-yourself social application building.

Demo Scenario
Group of friends planning potluck dinner party. They need to coordinate around details, including who’s bringing what. You want to create a to-do list that everyone can share and update.

Implementation

1. Build a new application in iBuild for identifying tasks and assigning them to Orkut friends. (iBuild is a gadget in iGoogle or Orkut). Specify what kind of information you want to track. This includes a field that allows the user to select from a list of friends in e.g. Orkut.

2. Next, generate a gadget and share it with everyone involved. The gadget can reside in Orkut, iGoogle, or any container supporting OpenSocial, like MySpace.

3. Friends jointly update the list through the application in whatever social network they are in.

4. The Activity Stream reflects task assignments and status updates, thereby providing friend-based task workflow.

Coming soon……

The Six Pillars of Social Networks

With social networks being in the news so much these days, I get a lot of questions from people asking what social networking is really all about. So here is my social networking story.

Social networks consist of the following pillars:

(1) You define your personality on the Web through your profile - what books and music you like, photos you have taken, etc.

(2) The whole idea of a social network is to socialize, so you need to tell the social network about your friends. Your friends make up your social graph.

(3) When you do things like upload photos, write comments, send little gifts, etc., you want your friends to know, and you also want to know what they are up to. This is the function of the activity stream - an ongoing log of what people are doing (the “newsfeed” in Facebook).

(4) You do things on a social network, like play a game, find a date, “poke” someone, post a classified ad, etc. You do this through an application.

(5) You can create a new or join an existing group, where like-minded people hang out and discuss a common interest, like Jon Stewart or Spongebob.

(6) You can also join a network - a group that you are automatically part of by virtue of the fact that you live in Chicago, or went to school at Yale, or even that you live in a particular apratment building.