I have been working with my business partner on making garden gnomes to sell online. We have a corporate website, a wiki, and all sorts of other great collaboration tools. I am a huge proponent of wikis, but my fascination with ideas does not always translate into practicing what I preach.

We have setup a socialtext install of the open source version of their wiki software. I love how it is put together, and is a great solution, if only I knew how to organize it better. Since Jeff, my business partner, and I are leading the way in the company for it’s use. The term Ross Mayfield of socialtext uses, is “gardener”.

I sympathize with dewy, from the dewy decimal system (no clue if it was a real guy, anybody feel like wikipeding it, post in the comments). How do you categorize ideas, projects, and tasks that are all related to each other? As I figure this out, I will write my conclusion. Or better yet I will find someone else with a degree in project management who has a nice blog on the subject, and link to them!

ta ta for now.

My roommate just informed me about Google moving into social networking. I wrote a post about what I had heard yesterday, but today is a new day, right?

Here is a snipet from the article above:

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com

Simply put, Google has created a distributed social network framework that will end up competing with Facebook and MySpace (and Bebo in markets like the UK). It is kind of a ‘third place’ of social networks - and it is a huge boost to the less populous or more specialized social networks such as Ning, Hi5 and our old friend Friendster.

It’s not entirely clear yet what the benefits will be to users. I assume there will be some interoperability - e.g. when a user joins up to a Ning social network, there may be hooks into their Friendster profile and data. Will this be the full ‘export’ functionality that industry people like Marc Canter have been crying out for? It remains to be seen. I think it’s fair to assume there won’t be an export function from OpenSocial to Facebook or MySpace, at this point anyway. I’d love to be proven wrong though.

This is the beginning of opening up the walled gardens of current social networks, but the biggest player, myspace, is joining in on the Open Social fun. I am curious to see what kind of apps come out of this move, and how they will benefit the end user. After facebook opened up their api to developers, I saw lots of crazy apps that could be fun, but were mostly pointless (vampire, super wall, too many to list). Just as email has become ubiquitous because of its (mostly) open standards nature, social networks may turn into more useful tools, and less teenage time wasters.

Another article by Tech Crunch enumerates the benefits to developers by having an open system with a standard framework to build their applications on.

Here are some interesting things I have read about recently. I am a huge advocate of open source, and have been frustrated with the so called “Walled Gardens” of social networks. I am not by any means an expert on these concepts, so here are a few other people’s blogs, and what they have to say on social networking, open source, and some plans Google has to change all that.

A very through analysis of the state of social networking, and the possible trend towards open api

Life hacker’s opinion on opening up the social network communities.

Interesting article by IT Manager’s Journal on open source business strategies. They are able to be competitive, and profitable, it just requires work to understand where a companies real value is, and give away the rest (one open source business model I find interesting).
Here are several social networking sites I use personally
Linkedin
Facebook
Plaxo

Here is an article talking about the possibility of Google doing a 3 dimensional social network

And more big announcements by Google, the giant choosing to open up their platform even more, to allow third party software to interface with all of Googles online goodies.

I like using some of these websites/tools/take-over-your-digital-life, but I wonder how many of these I will be using in a few years. Sure I am single, carry my laptop with me everywhere, and feel lost if I have not gone online in a day, but I don’t really have a life now, what if I ever get one? One day we may find a balance between the things we do online, and how those affect our real world experiences. I hope my digital life can enrich my real life, and not take it over. (and I am not talking about second life here, just in case you caught an unintentional reference)