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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Don’t Make Me Decide Yet: Lowering the Barrier to Entry

A few days ago Josh Porter was tweeting about the notion of “fatigue points”:

I think it’s a very useful concept, pointing out that people’s decisions aren’t binary: it isn’t a single yes/no decision but an active, ongoing negotiation, which determines which services you use and don’t use.

You can also think about the barrier to entry of a new user in a similar fashion. Any time you try out a new application or service there are a few barriers, and whatever the application developer can do to lower those barriers the more users will get over that threshold.
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One way openness, or learning to spit as well as suck

TechCrunch wrote last week about changes Facebook made to the news feed:

Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed.

The problem is that their only talking about allowing users to *add* activities into the news feed, not to take their facebook news feed and take it elsewhere. As TechCrunch put it:
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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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Activity Streams, Prologue

Lots of activity in the last week on the distributed social networking front.

Matt and co. at Automattic released Prologue, a WordPress theme (GPLv2) which creates a twitter-like experience based on posts to a WordPress blog. (It’s already been updated once).

Check out the Prologue Demo Blog for a sense of how the theme works. This could easily be used to create a kind of workgroup twitter, and given the number of different plugins / mechanisms for creating a blog post it could be extended to mobile, IM, and other integration points. The important difference, of course, is that you’d be hosting your own experience, not relying on Twitter - though that also means you’d need to build your own audience.

The folks at SixApart released the Activity Streams plugin for Movable Type which

lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web as well as a list of your profiles on various services. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren’t trapped in any one service.

You can see a great example of this on David Recordon’s site (he’s the Open Platform Lead for SixApart) and in a group context on the Movable Type Activity Stream page.

Both of these represent significant advances toward an open source, open standards, portable data approach to social networking and lifestreaming.

Since the implementations are open source, expect similar functionality to be ported across platforms.