Magic Beans Grow Portable Social Networks
You've seen the calls for open identity standards and data portability. Well, Social Beans aims to create standardized "skeleton portability" across social media publishing platforms. What is "skeleton portability"? According to co-founder Emre Sokullu, "Comments, forums, wikis, blogs, rating systems, tagging, sharing and bookmarking are all common social features of today's networking sites". Despite the fact that these are all common denominators of the web, developers continue to hack together their own proprietary implementations. Says Sokullu, "Social Beans aims to standardize a syntax around common social features including users, profiles, avatars, roles and news feeds." For developers, it's a pact for "development portability" or the agreement to follow the same rules for compilers.
Much like the original premise of Ning, Social Beans simplifies the creation of community websites. However, since it is a portable format, a Social Beans site is not locked in to a single provider. In addition to the Grou.ps platform, the 0.1 version works with MediaWiki and WordPress. A Drupal plugin is also expected for October 2009.
At this point, Social Beans is extremely experimental and while it's an interesting concept, the group's fate lies in 2 simple questions: Is it an easy enough template for non-technical users to adopt it? And perhaps more importantly, will developers build engines to run it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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Doesn't look really ready for prime time. I see no discussion of security in there. Anyone?
Thanks Dana for your interest and the coverage.
@JM Decombe: well, it has just started, we're getting the word out.
@Emre: OK, sorry, I missed the "extremely experimental" part above, and focused instead on "will developers build engines to run it?", which is then a bit premature to answer at this stage. Cheers and good luck.
@JM Decombe: Currently grou.ps supports the version 0.2 as a consumer and publisher, and there are 0.1 publisher plugins for Wordpress and MediaWiki. 0.2 consumer support for MediaWiki, Wordpress and Drupal is in our todo list.
Sounds like a great idea. Good luck guys as you work on it! I can't wait for it to be less "extremely experimental" :)
@JM what do you mean by security btw? privacy? publishers should of course be able to opt out of the program. that's in our todo list.
@Mihaela thanks, soon...
I think it is a great idea to build some kind of a library for most of the common functions of social sites. That way the developers can spend more time on thinking about "what to do?" instead of how to implement it. Twitter and Facebook API s makes me think that everything is flowing in that direction too.
Isn't google wave kind of the same idea where sharing, blogging, wiki, forum all of those are integrated in a single wave which can be shared in different wave client on different platforms?
Good luck!
@Cihan thanks but there's no connection/similarity with wave.
@Emre, Sorry I made the comment before watching the video. Yes, there is no connection. Looking forward to try it out! Cheers
I agree that effectively using the power of online marketing is considerably more complex than either TV advertising or Direct Mail.
However, I believe the root of that reality lies in our rapidly changing world of WAY too many choices (for EVERYTHING!) and WAY too many modes of receiving information being thrust upon human beings with ever shrinking attention spans, and time or even desire to think critically about what is coming at them.
It’s a bit like the early days of the web when everyone was putting up static websites that mimicked their organizational brochures.
Our technology is SO outstripping our evolution as users, consumers and inhabitants of the planet.