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Ian May

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Personal Web

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Very soon, I’m going to need to get a database together to track all the social networks I’ve joined. Let me see, if I can even remember then all….

There’s Twitter, Plurk, Seesmic, YouTube, FriendFeed, Library Thing StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnol.ia, bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, BrightKite, Last.fm, ILike, Flixster…. and more I can’t remember off the top of my head right now.

You know, I’ll never be bored when I retire, I’ll have so many by then, I can spend my whole day, posting stuff everywhere, to everyone, about… well nothing at all for the most part.

You see, although services like IM, and Twitter and Plurk have their uses, and can be used in a more serious way if you wish, they’re also great for simply passing the time of day, having a chat, exchanging idle gossip and so on.

I suspect some folks concentrate on one or two of these services, and take little notice of the others. I find I tend to use chat type apps, or where I can write something, more, much more, than video based services such as YouTube. Then again, I’m not very visually stimulated really. I watch very little television, seldom watch movies, and only really go into YouTube, when someone sends me a link, or the very occasional wander in myself, usually when I’m looking for a music video to watch.

I guess before long I’ll have to do a “stocktake” on some of these services I’ve joined, and either make a bit more use of a few of them, or toss them out….

OpenSocial From Google

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OpenSocial is basically three APIs bundled together that allows developers to roll out the same application across a number of participating social networks.

So far, the big draw is OpenSocial’s supposed simplicity and openness. Facebook keeps its data secret and  developers have to use its own markup language, whereas OpenSocial is  allowing developers to work with a simple set of tools consisting of HTML, javascript, and elements of Flash. Here’s how it comes together:

First, there are the “hosts,” who are essentially a group of participating social networks. Google wisely dipped into Facebook’s pool of competitors by nabbing Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning, Salesforce, Friendster, Viadeo, and Oracle right out the gate.

OpenSocial will work with another group, dubbed “developers” that includes many familar to Facebook’s users such as RockYou, Slide, iLike and Flixster

 It’ll be interesting to see what evolves over the next few months.