How about the announcement last week that Yahoo agrees to join with Google and MySpace around OpenSocial. Actually, what they did is create an OpenSocial Foundation! This is great. Developers need to be able to write applications that are targeted for social networks in such a way that they run in all of them without change (or in reality - at least with minimal change). That definitely is not the case today.So why do we care. Well, freshbrain.org is build on a social networking platform - Drupal. I talked about this in the past. What we want is for developers to be able to write applications that can then run on our platform as well. We will need to support OpenSocial. But that is what we are all about - leveraging open source and standards as much as possible.
With Yahoo, OpenSocial gets closer to ubiquity. We of course still need Facebook. They are not excited about the idea as they are the leaders right now and they were pretty early with applications. I hope that this recent announcement will help push them to commit!
Second on my list is an announcement by Adobe that they are launching Adobe Photoshop Express - a limited online version of Adobe Photoshop. While I thought the last one was great, this one is more of ... about time. Adobe is releasing something that others already have. They are heading in the right direction, and they do have one nice feature - integration with flickr. But as I said, it is about time.And third (last) on my list, an update on FreshBrain. We have been working hard. Lots of small things to mention (ok, some of these are not small to us).
- Working during Beta to improve usability of freshbrain.org.
- Improving search - really critical to the students.
- Simplifying the concept of projects, how you view them, start one and join one.
- Signing up partners. I will do a whole section on this soon.
- Readying FreshBrain to hire our own employees (insurance, benefits, etc.).
- Beginning to drive volume - launched our first contest on the new site!
Talk again to you soon.
