So what does social mean?

Here I put an answer that is given by a eight year old girl when she was asked a question “What do you do with your friends”. She answered “look at each other, talk to each other, laugh at each other, we help each other, we read together, we do projects together”.

I got the following answer from a 4 year old kid studying in kinder garden. In her school they have teddy bears which every student takes home and brings back the next day. While at home she takes photos with the teddy bear, feed it and so on. Next day at school they share the photos taken with the bear. Here the teddy bear acts as a Social Object and derive at the term “Social” within two different contexts.

Now in the Web, the Social Objects is tied around the following key aspects

? What is your Object
? What are your verbs
? How can people share objects
? What is the gift in the invitation
? Business

We can answer the above questions with reference to what we see and experience around the web. The first question “What is your Object?” Consider the example of Flicker and treat that as a Social Object which is an online photo management and sharing system. Now the second question “What are your verbs?” Everyone uses eBay for selling or buying the commodities. These are the verbs that we perform a social object.

Now the third question “How can people share objects?” here one gives a unique url to the shared photos that be accessed by our friends. The fourth point “What is the gift in the Invitation?”. In order to attract others to interact, gifts are required to excite them in addition to the invitation that makes them happier. And the last but not the least the ultimate “Business”

“How do we socialize objects without having to create yet another social network?”

There are thousands of social networking sites around us; we ourselves have developed over half a dozen of them; Why reinvent the wheel ? Open Social can be defined as “A common set of API’s for building social applications across multiple sites”. To realize this concept the Google took the initiative along with the internet giants yahoo and MySpace to form the “Open Social Foundation”.

The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the Open Social platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.
Based on HTML and JavaScript, as well as the Google gadgets framework, Open Social includes four APIs for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks. Each API addresses a different aspect: one is the general JavaScript API, one for People and Friends (people and relationship information), one for Activities (publishing and accessing user activity information), and one for Persistence (simple key-value pair data for server-free stateful applications).

Contributed by Sujith PV. Web developer Software Associates

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 6:56 am and is filed under Google API, Social networking, internet, opensocial, research. 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.