Innovation Toronto » social networking

I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day

innovation2 — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:50:35 +0000

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for more than a few months knows I’m bullish on mobile social networking.

The space is wide open at this point - no one has created an application that has gotten enough traction to go mainstream. That’s partly because of tech limitations - browser based networks don’t leverage the power of the mobile device, and client based applications are blocked by service providers and handset limitations.

But it’s coming. A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

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Online Chat, as Inspired by Real Chat

innovation2 — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:45:48 +0000

photo credit: blogsorbeta

SAN FRANCISCO — Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social.

People visit each other’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator.

Now a new wave of Silicon Valley companies is bringing live socializing back into a medium that has, in the parlance of the technologists, grown overly asynchronous.

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Web 3.0: User-generated Networks?

ron — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:58:18 +0000

European researchers took the concepts of Web 2.0, like user-generated content and social networking, into the real world. They hope to create user-generated physical networks so internets could be set up, by anyone, anytime. It’s radical and, surprisingly, fairly realistic. Welcome to Web 3.0.

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“Set the Data Free”

ron — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 03:51:15 +0000

Is OpenSocial open enough? The problem with OpenSocial, Google’s new platform for social-networking apps, notes Tim O’Reilly, is that it doesn’t go quite far enough. It lets applications out from the confines of any one Website, but it does not let the data out. Apparently, you cannot mix and match data from more than one app to create a new social app. This is wrongheaded, argues O’Reilly:

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Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly

ron — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:05:38 +0000

FACEBOOK is an island. A most convivial island, with one’s classmates, friends, workmates and family members close at hand. An island that since May has been enlivened with entertaining fauna and flora in the form of minisoftware applications. But it’s still an island.

Suppose, however, that you could leave the island compound of a social networking site and take your network of friends, and friends of friends, anywhere on the Web? This is what makes Google’s announcement last week of a new alliance of companies so enticing — the possibility that social networking will become ubiquitous.

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