Monday links - 2008-06-23

• Pageonce keeps all your details in one place - no OpenID but it claims its very secure
• http://addictomatic.com/ -"inhale the web". It's web troika people-aggregation is the key.
• http://www.electricsheep.org/ - beautiful screen saver which is built as your computer "sleeps".
• http://www.napkinnotebook.com/ - this is what the internet is there for really
• Create word clouds - via Ben and Julie
• Google's webmaster API

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Who's following whom?

Every wondered who's really following you on Twitter?

Well now with Twitter Karma you can see and bulk follow them in return.

Found via @warrenellis.

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Monday link - 2008-02-04

As it's my birthday today I bring you just one link but, a pretty important one.

Google's Social Graph API.

In the past I've written about microformats and some potential uses, but now along comes one of the biggest forces on the web with a way to start bringing all these pieces of content together.

Watch the video to see the basic premise behind this and then try not to think of things you could start doing with this. This also shows that Google has been looking closely at the code we've been putting out as developers...

We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections.

Now all of those bits and pieces of microformatted content such as reviews, events, etc. can start to (perhaps) rise in the Google rankings.  If something is marked up as a review and it's from someone you know that should be higher in your desired results as some random result.

By using one of the tools already developed you can see who you are connected to.  Here's the results for this blog.

As I said towards the end of 2007, I'm looking forward to the advances I thought would happen on the web - I just didn't think I'd see some of them this quick.

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Is OpenSocial the beginning of a truly social internet?

So I read Om Malik's post Tuesday about OpenSocial - Google's platform for social networks.  Exciting stuff!

Having the day off on Wednesday meant that I missed some shuffling on this story and then today, when details were scheduled to be released, even more players came to the fore when the press conference was moved up.

Google's OpenSocial is a set of commons APIs for use with all social networks that participate.  This is different from Facebook who developed their own markup language which does not play with others…at all.

Marc Andreessen has a good screencast showing OpenSocial working on his blog.  His Ning network is one of those taking part.

TechCrunch has a piece with the update news release and the new players, including MySpace (abandoning their own markup languauge), LinkedIn and Salesforce.com so this is not just about seeing what your "friends" favorite movie is.  This can, and will, impact businesses as well as their employees in and out of the workplace.

Now I haven't seen any chatter about where Social Network Portability fits in, which is a shame, but with open and shared APIs that are based around normal HTML etc. it can't be too far behind.

This is definitely something to keep an eye on over the coming months.

Technorati tags: opensocial, google, microformats, social+networks,api

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