Facebook Comments Box, Ownership

I’ve been looking into the Facebook Comments Box, which launched in February.

Photo by suburbanslice

It’s a perfect example of what I’m seeing as a growing trend, in which various “social widgets” actually replace functionality which should be built into the platform hosting the site. Bundling together the ability to use your Facebook identity with the actual management of comments themselves looks like progress but I think it’s really a step backwards.
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LinkedIn Gets Events

(via Bokardo on Twitter and the LinkedIn Blog)

Building on the momentum of all the (OpenSocial based) applications they added a few weeks back, LinkedIn is now rolling out events. In this video, Christine Wodtke demonstrates how the application leverages your social graph, showing who in your network is attending various events:

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BrightKite, FireEagle, and Airports

I use BrightKite to update my location via SMS, and it feeds FireEagle, which in turn posts to my lifestream via Movable Type and the Action Streams Plugin. If any of that made sense, keep reading.
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Babbledog

Last week’s Berkman Thursday Blog Group was an update on Babbledog – Jessica, one of the folks who does QA/testing on the site, walked us through the existing features and some stuff that’s still in alpha/beta phase.

It’s an interesting site – a cross between Digg or Reddit (in that you can post new stories/topics which folks can vote up or down) but also a kind of recommendations engine which pulls in lots of back end feeds and suggests stories to you based on your expressed preferences (answers to a quiz about what you are and are not interested in) as well as your implicit preferences (what you post, read, comment on, etc).
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Resources for Designing Online Communities or Social Web Applications

A couple of recent publications on designing / building social web applications that you should check out. More to say about each after the jump.

• Joshua Porter on the Bungee Line Podcast
• Chris Brogan’s Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• Forrester Report from Jeremiah Owyang on Online Community Best Practices

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