365questions.org

I recently joined Facebook at the invite of an old friend, but I was rather reluctant to be in yet another social network. I explained to him social networks had never been of any use for me.

But thinks may be changing.

I started to like Linkedin when they launched the job features, where you could see who in your network was close to the person posting the offer, or could connect you to someone in the company. I thought that was really good. But I never used it.

A few days ago I saw an interesting new feature called “Linkedin Answers”. People ask a question to their network and I was amazed at the quality of content that was generated… Some questions generate real conversations. It’s a bit what I would have liked 365questions to turn out, a place where you launch conversations…

I saw an interesting questions for which I suggested a link, and I received a nice note from the author of the question saying he would never had found that link without this linkedin feature. And really, I think that’s right. Some things cannot be found easily even with the best search engines… it’s better when people point them out to you. That’s the power of social bookmarking by the way.

Why would Linkedin have more success in this field than Yahoo or Google answers, I don’t know. But it sure is useful. I may go and ask some questions over there.

For example, I could ask Linkedin members about what they think of the new Google Open Social Platform…

From what I gathered rapidly this set of API will be common to many Web 2.0 companies, including linkedin, and would allow developers to create apps out of useful web 2.0 features, without having to use a proprietary code for each of these sites.

So what we would get is some kinds of extensions or mashups out of many different sites, based on a standard language (javascript and html). We could have something like, let’s say, features of Linkedin Answers mixed with Facebook profiles and Google maps.

The question remains : will this make Social Networks finally useful ? Still what is the frontier between a gadget and a killer app ? Will Google Open Social allow everyone to code the web ?

OpenSocial - Google Code

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Real Questions, web apps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.