You may have noticed some new additions to the page. I’ve incorporated Gigya and MyBlogLog into the site. I’m continually amazed at the versatility and flexibility of wordpress and the community that surrounds it. It was surprisingly easy to add and setup these tools to create hooks into the social networks out there.
Social networking has really exploded over the last two years and it looks like this trend has now become a permanent part of the internet. However, the explosion has created a lot of islands of different social networks. I’m starting to see the trend that these networks are slowly opening up to each other. Mind you, these openings are still quite small and usually limited to cross posting functionality. The big players seem to realize that closed fiefdoms on the internet can slow a website’s evolution to the point of irrelevance to its user base.
I find it interesting how some of these sites were able to evolve by understanding their user’s underlying need which differed from the original intention of the site. Twitter is a good example of this. I first heard about twitter as being a service that would allow a person to spam their twitter followers with phone text messages. I wasn’t interested in being texted the minute by minute activities of my friends so I never signed up. As Twitter evolved (and received more press) into a microblogging list, I found it very useful. I could stay informed about new and interesting information which the people I follow have found. The 140 character limit is absolute gold! It limits what each person can say… and it gives me the ability to quickly scan and find something that I’d be interested in. I’ve found lots of useful content which I would have otherwise not have found.
As always, this site is my own personal experiment to better understand the changing technologies out there today. It’s one thing to read about all the tools and yet another to actually play around with them to learn their strengths and weaknesses.
Gigya
This is exactly what I was looking for… I find it annoying that I need to sign up a new account for almost every web site I visit (that has a login system). I’ve lost track of how many different passwords I’ve forgotten because each site required me to create one. With Gigya, people can authenticate against their email accounts or social networks.
MyBlogLog
This looks like an automated guest book. Rather than leave a message which others aren’t likely to read, users can leave a footprint of their visit. I’ll be honest that I don’t quite get it just yet but I’ll run it a while and see what happens.
Related posts: