Today I launched an intelligent blacklisting feature on SocialToo.com. After registering and logging into your SocialToo! Dashboard, you’ll see a text box where you can enter twitter screen names you would like to blacklist. For each “spammer” you see, or individual you simply do not want to follow, enter their Twitter screen-name, and when a certain percentage of users on SocialToo.com all blacklist that same user (we have a unique algorithm that determines that, based on crowd-sourcing the definition of “Spam” on Twitter), we add that name to a global blacklist on SocialToo.com. When anyone chooses to auto-follow those that follow them on Twitter using the SocialToo! auto-follow feature, now those users will never be followed. You can now ignore them forever, hindering their reasons for being on Twitter!

SocialToo.com is a project I term, “the Companion to the Social Web”. After registering you have options such as the ability to automatically follow those that follow you on Twitter, add an automated message that gets sent to users (via dm) after they follow you for the first time, and on Facebook, redirect to your Facebook profile via yourusername.socialtoo.com. More features are being worked on for multiple social networks, and the idea is to find all the needs that just are not provided by the traditional Social Networks, and make them available to the public. If you have a need let me know. All scripts that run behind the scenes at SocialToo.com I am releasing on a single-user level via Open Source (GPL v.2) so you can run it on your own server should you desire.

The final feature, released today, is this Global, Intelligent, blacklisting feature. This feature, to me makes much more sense than services like twitterblacklist.com, since rather than depending on ratio only, we’re depending on actual user definition, by the masses to determine who is a “spammer” on Twitter. I’ll look to also integrate with twitterblacklist.com’s API in the future, and maybe even contribute back to it as we grow, but this is the start of something big. This is truly a Groundswell opportunity (I’m reading Charlene Li’s book right now) that you can be a part of.

Starting today, Yahoo is opening up the beta for their Search Monkey platform, which is to be a new way to organize and format search results. He showed some interesting formatting of search results with reviews, descriptions, etc.

According to them, Yahoo’s open strategy is about opening up all the properties of Yahoo. First of such will be an Application platform. They will be socializing all of their properites, unifying the user profiles, and integrating the ability to add “applications” across all Yahoo properties and apply Social properties to those applications.

According to Yahoo, they are “Not creating ‘yet another social network’”. Yahoo does not view “Social” as a destination. It should be an integrated environment. He showed some examples of integration within the Yahoo mail environment, showing a way to pop up messages most relevant to the individual through the Social Graph. Taking Yahoo portable will also be an integral part of this.

Yahoo says that later this year the first version of Y! OS will be delivered. This will include the beginning of Social Graph and Application Development platform, and an entirely new dimension of developing applications at Yahoo will become available.

This is huge news for Yahoo - it puts them up at par with Google and Facebook, and will change the way you use the internet as you know it. Expect to see more from Google along these lines in the future - I believe the iGoogle OpenSocial integration predicts this. With Yahoo as a part of the OpenSocial foundation, I expect them to integrate OpenSocial as part of this, and move to a fully social strategy. I’m very excited for this announcement and look forward to Y! OS to come into play at the end of this year.

Let’s just start with the fact that anyone can join the sandbox! Google has not given any information on if information stored on the sandbox will be deleted when they go live, but indications are that this data will remain when the sandbox goes live. This sandbox seems different than the Orkut sandbox, in that the sandbox, and the live site are one integrated environment. If you sign up for the sandbox, when you go to http://www.google.com/ig it automatically takes you to the sandbox environment every time, and not the live environment. Are you an early adopter and want access to see your friends feeds and share your profile with them? Just sign up for the Sandbox here, add the developer tools tab (Note, tabs are gone - not sure what to call it now. Also, the link in the developer docs is wrong - use the one I just posted.), and now, under “Developer Tools” you will begin seeing all your friends, you can invite new friends, and see their status updates.

Here’s what the new iGoogle Sandbox is:

• Goodbye Tabs! — “Tabs” in iGoogle previously allowed you to segregate your Gadgets into different “views”, and Google even created pre-populated views such as “Finance” where they gave you all the Gadgets you needed for a particular subject. Google appears to have removed tabs in the sandbox, opting instead to put the “views” (or whatever Google will call them) into a sidebar on the left.

  

  I mentioned on Twitter earlier that the new vision Facebook is giving us for user Profiles has a striking resemblance to iGoogle’s tabbed interface. That is all Google is doing here - they are providing a true, open, customizable environment that they have already put years into in order to create the ultimate user profile for an individual. Now Google just needs a way to allow you to determine which of the “Views” will be visible by your friends - trust me, Google has way more up their sleeve on this one. Facebook has a lot to catch up in this. Frankly, Facebook’s best strategy may remain in the walled-garden approach.

  

• Friends from Google Reader and Gmail are now integrated in one, viral environment! — I have mentioned that Google Reader’s “Friends” integration was only the beginning for Google’s social efforts. I also argued that the API Google gives you to access Gmail Friend data is a big thing. Now, within a single environment, you can write applications that have access to these “Friends”, as well as all of your Gmail contact data. Ask it to suggest friend to you - you’ll notice it seems to be using that Gmail Contact API to retrieve your Gmail contacts and add them as friends.

  

  Now go into your Gmail contacts - how many people are on your contacts list? I’m willing to bet that for most people it’s way more than you have in Facebook or Myspace or LinkedIn. Imagine what will happen when that entire friends list begins adding each other as friends. This is why I think Google is building the largest Social Network ever. The great thing is Google’s platform is so vast you may not even know you’re in a “Social Network”. This is what Charlene Li was mentioning when she said Social Networks of the future will be transparent.

• Google Reader Profile is now easier to update and share with others — after you add the Developer Tools, you’ll notice your Google Reader Profile is now displayed and integrated for you. Where many people are using iGoogle as their Home Page of their browser, this now gives you a profile to edit, and share with others. Much of this data is available via the OpenSocial API and can be shared with others via Applications. Google is only beginning to give the user a sense of a “Profile” through this update - expect to see much more from them.

  

• “Updates” Feed/Gadget — under Developer Tools you’ll also see a “Status Updates” Gadget. This is a slap right in the “face” of Facebook’s News Feed in that now any interactions you make in Google Reader get stored in this Gadget, and shared on your Friends’ iGoogle pages. I believe this information will also eventually be available and updateable via the OpenSocial API.

  

• Status Updates — One cool thing I noticed is that when your “Updates” Gadget updates itself, it automatically updates a “Status” under your name in your profile. It doesn’t appear that it updates your Gmail status, but I expect that to happen in the future as well. I’d also love to see this updatable via the OpenSocial API and manually, as well.

  

• Automatic Invitations interface for your Apps — in the upper-right of each Gadget, there is a link to “Share this Gadget”. Click on that, and you can invite your friends to add the gadget as well. This is a great viral way to start, along with the Updates Feed, but I imagine we’ll also see ways to further get into the invitations architecture via OpenSocial in the future. For now, I suggest the Google Contacts API.
  

Now, imagine Google Apps getting this same functionality in the future and your business being allowed to have the same access to iGoogle Gadgets - Enterprise 2.0 is knocking at our doors, my friends! Google has just given us almost all the same functionality as Facebook, in an open, not walled garden. Google has just “Checked” Facebook here I believe.

As mentioned earlier, starting next week they will begin adding more applications to the directory on a first-come, first-serve basis, giving priority to those that were submitted on or before 2/15. Members of the development team will be hanging out starting next week in the opensocial irc channel on freenode to answer questions from the development community. Congratulations Orkut! Let’s hope to see many more successful launches in the near future!

Will you be submitting your App to the directory?

The “template” idea it was mentioned won’t be available in the OpenSocial 0.8 spec, but they did introduce a timeline for the template concept. The timeline is as follows:

• April 14th. Kick off
• April 23rd. Draft proposal submitted to spec group for feedback
• May 7th. Deadline for issues to be raised
• May 28th. Resolution on all issues and spec version 1.0
• TBD. Reference implementation

It is estimated that developers should be able to start using a pre-release version of the javascript library enabling templates much earlier than May 28th.

As the author of O’Reilly’s “FBML Essentials“, I am very excited for this. Having such a library available will reduce the amount of code developers have to write for OpenSocial, as well as the number of requests back to our servers we have to make. It now makes you wonder if this is the final “template” spec, or will we see an XML-based spec like FBML come out when a RESTful API is released?

One of my favorite parts of the Google OpenSocial Hackathon back in February was the guidance by one of the leaders of the OpenSocial team on how to write good code and apps that will engage users. There’s nothing better than learning Ux from a Google coder himself! I feel these guidelines are another way Google is giving back to the development community - there are some great tips here on not just how to write an OpenSocial app, but how to develop the right way. If you’re a coder or a non-coder, be sure you or your team gets to read these. Without, your application will most likely stand the chance of becoming denied after submission for the Orkut launch.

Developers can submit their applications here, and those that submitted their applications on or before 2/15 (the Hackathon date) will have first priority in the new Application directory. I really hope this is the case and it will be coming. Most of us users, as we saw from Facebook, are used to flaws in the applications at first - we just want the new functionality! If Google can just get it to “Good Enough” state Orkut could be very successful, even in the United States. Is it really going to happen this time?

Truthfully, on a product-by-product basis, the Bungee Labs folks have it right when they say they are now competitors with Google. Bungee was one of the inventors of the term, “Platform as a service”. The funny thing is, Bungee is a strong supporter of Amazon Web Services. They were actually right there when Jeff Barr came by a few months ago and spoke to our Social Media Developers Garage, and actually met with him the following day to discuss ways to integrate. Bungee Labs are perhaps one of the closest competitors with Google Apps Engine, and the interesting thing is, this is actually helping their business!

I know I mentioned this earlier during the hype, but I correct myself when I say that Amazon S3 and EC2 are not competitors to Google Apps Engine. Google Apps Engine is simply too high a level to be a competitor. I will still need a place to host my blog, or run my mail server, or just, for now, program in Perl (click on the star here to change that!). True, Google provides those services as well, but it’s a fact that not everyone likes to use those. Microsoft Exchange is still the largest E-mail and Communications server out there. Businesses like to own their information, and Google Apps Engine is not for them (at least yet).

It is still important mentioning that the launch of Google Apps Engine is still one of the most hyped events amongst developer circles I have seen since F8 (Note that Paul’s almost met his prediction now!). Our local Python Users Group is holding a meeting tomorrow just to demonstrate it and go over how it can be used amongst developers. They didn’t do this for OpenSocial, and they didn’t do it for Facebook. This news is huge in developer circles because all of the sudden it puts power in developers’ hands to actually afford the hosting of their products, assuming you don’t mind that product being stuck on Google’s servers. I expect a very large grass roots effort from this launch from developers creating a new wave of apps that they could never before afford to host and continue to maintain as their apps became more popular.

Now, what if Google were to begin integrating with their other services such as Google Apps, OpenSocial (through Orkut), Gmail, Google Docs, or even Jaiku or Picasaweb? David Recordon on the O’Reilly Radar today makes a good point that with the current integration of Google Accounts, integration with sites like Orkut may not even be necessary. It is the data you’ll be able to get from the account’s friend and other data that will also be powerful. Add to that the cross-integration possibilities (which is currently possible through Javascript on OpenSocial, and REST and Javascript Client API on Facebook), Google will soon be the place to host Apps on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter, and others. What if Google were to write a common library for the Apps Engine allowing you to post to all the social networks and integrate back and forth with a common code-base? All this is possible when Google controls the API.

Of course, all this is theoretical. Facebook is a platform, just like Google. Facebook I will admit is not quite there yet, and I wouldn’t necessarily call it a competitor yet. With a launch this big however anyone, especially in the platform arena, needs to be watching. I think in some ways this could be the beginning of the big things for Orkut and OpenSocial I was talking about earlier that Google is beginning to roll out. Note I said this is just the beginning.

The Service is only available to the first 10,000 developers that apply at http://code.google.com/appengine/, and will be available starting at 9pm PST tonight. You can read more at Venturebeat and TechCrunch here and here.

While such an announcement would be big, I suggest it’s not that at all. Let’s just say I have a source (and no it’s not my cousin), that suggested about a month ago that we should stay tuned to Orkut and OpenSocial, as the current Orkut, as it exists isn’t Google’s only answer to Facebook and the Social web. They couldn’t reveal much, but they said Google has much bigger plans for their Social Media strategy and we’d be hearing them soon. Add to that the advent of Google I/O next month I think Google is intending a lot of attention be thrown their way with new things they are doing. Where the last “Campfire One” event was OpenSocial related, I would suggest that this one is too. The question is, will this “Campfire One” be what my source was referring to? We’ll see who is right - me, or Mike Arrington.