Don’t you love the Olympics? I just watched as Michael Phelps received his 8th gold medal and Usain Bolt set a new world record as he blew away the competition in the 100 meter sprint. The spirit, courage and accomplishments of these young athletes is an inspiration to me.

And how about the myPicks Facebook application that allows me to pick my favorites for each event and see how I stack up against the rest of the folks who are participating?

This great little application was created by using Sun Microsystems’ Zembly Web 2.0 social network application development system. A truly innovative environment for application development, with Zembly you can:

” … easily create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web. Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, OpenSocialmeebo apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.”

You can read more on the Zembly blog about what great things people are saying about Zembly.

With Zembly helping us track the Olympics, we can really say that we have a champion tracking champions!

Congratulations to the Zembly team for creating something truly remarkable.

Technorati Tags: Zembly, Olympics, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Facebook, MyPicks

Sun announced today that source code is now available for Project SocialSite (under a CDDL/GPL license) and the project is now operating as an open source project within the umbrella Glassfish community:

“Project SocialSite is a set of Widgets and Web Services that you can use to add Social Networking features to your existing web sites and applications. It includes a Java web application that manages a comprehensive Social Graph repository and exposes that data via an OpenSocial-based REST API. SocialSite also includes a set of Widgets that can be used to create an end-to-end UI for Social Networking, including the ability to run OpenSocial Gadgets within the pages of your existing sites.”

Some Project SocialSite resources include:

Project SocialSite homepage on Java.net, with mailing lists and more:
https://socialsite.dev.java.net/

Screencast that illustrates the project concept:
https://socialsite.dev.java.net/screencasts/mediawiki_demo.html

Project blog with news and announcements:
http://blogs.sun.com/socialsite/

I’m looking forward to including some SocialSite-powered features on this blog in the near furture. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: SocialSite, Social Media, Social Networking, Widget, Web Services, REST, Social Graph, GlassFish

I am experimenting with a new web cam, using the Seesmic social network. Here is my Seesmic video profile.

You can follow me on Seemic @mgd.

Technorati Tags: socialmedia, seesmic, socialnetwork

Yesterday I invested a few dollars in a Creative Labs Optia AF video camera for my office and invested a bit of time connecting to Seesmic, now in alpha test. It looks to be great fun and may further collapse time and space between us. Please take a look at my video profile and let me know what you think.

My screen name is “mgd” on both Seemic and Flickr.

Technorati Tags: SocialMedia,
Seesmic

Thanks to my colleague Terry Sigle who referred Tripit.com to me Tuesday evening. I have been delighted with its real-world features that simplified my work life.

This afternoon, I completed a travel itinerary that required three separate reservations – two through the AMEX travel website and one through a direct call from a hotel. I then simply sent the three reservation emails, untouched, to tripit.com.

Voila! As if by magic, I received an email with a link to a composite itinerary complete with day-by-day weather forecasts, maps and driving directions. I easily verifed that everything was in sync printed out a combined schedule. Plus, all the individual reservations showed up on my i-cal compatible calendar and I easily accessed the itinerary via the mobile Tripit site.

In addition to this capability, Tripit.com has a social networking capability, similar to Dopplr, that allows travellers to link to each other and share travel plans. Please email me at mgd [at] sun [dot] com if you would like to connect and keep abreast of each other’s travel schedule.

This, my friends, is great stuff!

Technorati Tags: Tripit,
Travel,
Social Networking

I’m excited for the upcoming release of SocialSite, one of the cool bits of Sun’s open source technology introduced a JavaOne this week. I’ve been tracking this project for some time and look forward to actively using it when it becomes available. I’m particularly intrigued by its focus on integration: a social graph database that could be used to integrate multiple social networks and the easy process of integrating Open Social compliant widgets into web pages and applications.

From the Project SocialSite java.net page … “The SocialSite project is delivering social networking functionality by adding social networking platform support based on the OpenSocialTM standard to any community site. Any social application written for the OpenSocial based social network can be seamlessly and easily hosted on a transformed community site that is powered by the SocialSite project.”

My colleague Raja Doraisamy, the Sun product line manager responsible for SocialSite, pointed me to an introductory video on YouTube

I’ll keep you updated as the release date draws near.

Technorati Tags: Social Media,
Open Social

It was pure serendipity. Last weekend, I responded to a challenge posted on Sun’s internal bloggers alias to find a way to provide an RSS feed of all the known Sun Microsystems Twitter users. Here’s what I did …

I set up a Twitter account “sun_follow” that is now following (or has requested to follow) each person with whose name is listed on the list of known Sun Microsystems Twitter users.

I am monitoring that wiki page and will add new entrants on that page to the sun_follow account. I also set up a new “planet” on planets.sun.com to provide another view of all the tweets from these folks.

This little exercise yielded the following links:

• Composite view of tweets of Sun employees. Subscribe to Atom feed.
• Twitter “planet” view of these tweets. Subscribe to Atom feed.
• The list of twitter accounts being followed.

Now for the serendipity …

I didn’t have the privilege to fly to California to participate in JavaOne this year. But I finished my little “Sun on Twitter” project just in time to monitor a rich stream of tweets from several Sun employees who were particpating in CommunityOne yesterday and the main JavaOne event today. Thank you fellow Sunnies, for your Twittering! And thanks for a interesting little set of technology for making this little project possible.

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems,
Twitter,
JavaOne

Last night from my hotel room in McLean, Virginia, I listened to a webinar lead by Scott Brown of Sun Learning Services to introduce Sun employees to Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking tools. Although I’ve been dabbling with social networking since before I joined Sun, I spent the hour to get a sense of what was being said to my fellow employees from an “official channel.”

I really enjoyed the webinar and active conversation that accompanied it. This is yet another example of Sun’s strong support for social networking and other forms of active participation in cyberspace.

One phrase Scott used last night really tells the whole story. When asked why he participates in social networks – particularly in Facebook groups related to Sun – he said, “I like to go where energy is gathering.”

“Energy is Gathering!” Isn’t that an apt description of emerging virtual communities that draw us in to social networking and give meaning to our online participation? Scott eloquently described my attraction to social networking. What about you? What draws you in?

Technorati Tags: Social Networking,
Sun Microsystems

I stumbled across a fun little social networking service this week that makes it easy to share photos from my mobile phone. Twitxr (pronounced “Twitcher”) allows me to post photos via email to the Twitxr site, which will, in turn, post the photos to my Flickr, Twitter and Facebook accounts. The Twitxr site includes a Google Maps mashup that shows where photos have been taken, using an address placed in the email subject line.

My Treo 700p camera is not too good, and the process of sending photos from the phone by email is cumbersome, but Twitxr is certainly a step in the right direction of making posting and sharing photos an easy thing to do.

A Twitxr badge showing my latest Twitxr photo is also included on the right sidebar of my blog. Please take a look, sign up to follow me, and join me as a Twitxr friend.

Technorati Tags: Blogging,
Social Media,
Twitxr

When I first signed up for Twitter in May, I was skeptical at best. It seemed like a weird waste of time. However, over the ensuing months, Twitter has become a fixture in my daily life – informative, provocative and addictive – not because of the technology, but because of the people who share bits of their lives on line. Like most everything, Twitter isn’t perfect. Here are some of the things I like and don’t like about the Twitter experience:

My likes:

• Short messages. Like headlines in the newspaper, “tweets” must be short – 140 characters or less. I can scan each one quickly, get the gist of what is being said.
• Short links. Some tweets contain links to more content. If I’m interested, I will follow. If not, I move on. That’s how I read the newspaper.
• Twitbin. This Twitter client is a Firefox extension that also works on Flock, which I usually use, showing the latest 20 tweets from those whom I follow in the left sidebar of the browser. This is a great way to see the latest Twitter traffic at a glance.
• Tweetscan. This allows me so easily search the Twitter history repository by keyword. But most of all, I like the daily alerts from Tweetscan, listing the tweets which contained keywords in which I am interested.
• @name: It is easy to address another Twitterer by writing a tweet containing his or her Twitter name preceded by an “@” symbol. “@mgd” is my Twitter name if you want to try it out. Plus, I have a Tweetscan alert set to let me now whenever an @mgd message is sent, so I don’t miss any messages.
• Personal tweets, posted at a reasonable frequency. I like to learn what people are doing, but don’t like to read a book about them each day.
• The “Remove” button. Sort of like the TV Off switch. I can quit following folks when I lose interest or don’t like what they have to say. And people can do the same to me.
• Twitter sidebar on my blog. I put a small sidebar box on my blog to let readers know what I have been doing lately. It is a small, active part of my personal identity.
• SMS Tweets. It is really easy to post a tweet from my phone. Works great in a taxi or while I’m waiting for the airplane door to close.
• Announcment catharsis. I just get a kick out of letting folks know what I am doing from time to time.

My dislikes:

• Large number of tweets from any one individual each day. I quit following some twitterers because their frequent posts seemed to drown out everyone else.
• Unabashed commercial tweets. I quit following one twitterer because he only posted links to his information service website. If I was really interested in that, I could have subscribed directly to his site’s RSS feed.
• Profanity or vulgarity. Please keep it clean, folks. Remember, I control the “Remove” button.

What I would like to see.

• Palm OS Twitter client. I use mobile Twitter on the Safari browser, but it is kind of clumsy.
• Archiving. I’d like to be able to easily archive my updates at a neutral site, so I can be sure to preserve my Twitter “journal” for the sake of personal history.

So, you can see that my list of likes is longer than the lists of dislikes. I know that I am way out in the long tail of Twitterdom, but I kind of like it out here. I’d be interested to know what you think. Just tweet me @mgd. I’ll chirp back!

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Twitter,
Social Media