Darko on June 18th, 2008
The New York Times has launched a social networking platform called TimesPeople, which is in public beta.
TimesPeople is a Firefox browser add-on. The company says it will launch a public version of the social platform later this year that will not require a plug-in and will work on all major browsers.
TimesPeople will allow users to share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, comments on articles, and rate and review movies, restaurants and hotels. The platform will allow users to create their own network with other Times readers.
Users will have their own personal page that saves all the content they have shared along with the reviews and recommendations of other members in their network.
TimesPeople will not track routine site activity, such as when users read articles, click on links or view graphics. It will also not share private activities such as when a user emails an article or a video.
Users will be able to link their TimesPeople activity to their Facebook profile. Within Facebook users can control where their TimesPeople activity is displayed, including their Mini-Feed and other areas. Only users own activity will be available on Facebook and not the activity of others in a users TimesPeople network.
In the future TimesPeople will add improved people searches, the ability to import Google contacts, suggestions to help members find like-minded people, and integration with the NYTimes.com registration.
Darko on June 18th, 2008
With giants in the social networking field opening up their APIs to developers, social news sharing site Reddit is going a big step further today, opening its site’s entire source code to the open source community.
Reddit competes with Digg, Newspond, Mixx, and similar news aggregation sites. Its Web site was built using an open source platform and open source tools, but now the site’s source code will be freely available to everyone, downloadable from this address.
“We know Reddit’s success has less to do with our technology than it does with you, our community, and now we want to let our community improve our technology,” reads a post from developers of the Reddit Web site said today. They added only five people work on the Reddit team, though the site has always had a large following of developers within the open source community.Available under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), the Reddit code may now be freely used by anyone, though any modifications they may make must then be made open to the community, and the use of Reddit code must be publicly acknowledged. Only anti-cheating and spam protection code will not be open-sourced under the CPAL.
The public unveiling of Reddit’s infrastructure code will offer a unique glimpse behind the scenes of the kind of Web site that has traditionally remained behind closed doors. For example, some of the articles that make it to the front page on Digg occasionally baffle users as to how that site’s algorithms work.
The unveiling may also enable the community to make select changes to the site that they feel developers were too sluggish to have implemented themselves.
Even though Reddit is nowhere near the size of Digg, the site is now growing faster than the most popular user-submitted news site. Reddit now has 4.5 million unique visitors per month, and has grown almost 1,000% after its acquisition by Vanity Fair and Wired publisher Conde Nast.
Darko on April 18th, 2008
BEA’s new AquaLogic User Interaction (UI) 6.5 will give enterprise staff the type of collaboration tools which they now take for granted as consumers, such as status updates, said Martin Percival, senior technical evangelist for BEA.
The new release of AquaLogic Interaction allows users to produce individual profile pages.
“In the outside world, people are always updating their status on networking sites but they don’t think to do such things with their colleagues, and try and work out where they are in the enterprise,” said Percival.
“There is an interest on how fellow colleagues are getting on with materials and whether they have updated recent project plans,” he added. “The only other way to keep updating people is through email and people receive a staggering amount of email.”
AquaLogic UI 6.5 will allow firms to use RSS feeds and crawlers, enabling users to import content into a knowledge management framework. “The core offering is the portal is plugged into a collaboration tool, which allows you to publish tools and then use RSS to ship them out into, say, a Microsoft Office Page, so you are not locked into the portal itself,” said Percival.
The new release contains updates to AquaLogic Interaction, AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration, and AquaLogic Analytics.
Meanwhile, Percival said, there should be a final approval from the European Commission for the proposed acquisition by Oracle in “four to five weeks”.
