Walled Gardens
I hate them, all those social site “walled gardens.” This is why I’ve been somewhat excited by Google’s OpenSocial platform.
I pontificated a while back about reporter’s profile pages so that people could get to know better who’s doing the talking in our still-mostly-monologue medium. But decent profile pages are hard. You gotta have your widgets and your account maintenance and admin pages and styles and blech.
Seems stupid too to reinvent the perfectly good wheels that the various social sites have already invented with their own profile pages. ‘Cept social sites are walled, and that does newspapers — who should never be walled off — not a whit of good.
OpenSocial looks like it can meet me halfway. I think I can build pseudo-profiles from real profile pages hosted on OpenSocial compliant sites. This would leave the editing and maintenance up to the reporter and the account management up to the social site, and this makes me happy.
I say “looks like” because I haven’t figured out the right mojo yet. I didn’t get a whole lotta time this weekend to whack on OpenSocial but I did get a simple Twitter app working (”simple” being the operative word).
I’ll figure it out though.