Straight from the mind

A lot has been said and written about how businesses are using the stalwarts of social media like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube to build their brand name and connect with the masses. All these channels being consumer facing portals have proven to be the best for businesses that directly serve individual consumers with products and services. When it comes to the Business to Business angle, it is the more professional network LinkedIn that has helped businesses leverage on its social graph of professionals. But it seems like there is a new player on the block in the form of SlideShare.

SlideShare is a business media site for managing and sharing presentations and documents and currently boasts of having over 23 million visitors that view over 60 million pages every month. Going ahead in this post, I will be giving you a low down about SlideShare and why it becomes a critical element of the Professional Social Media Channels

Storing and Sharing…
SlideShare allows you to upload and share presentations, documents and spreadsheets of a wide variety of formats whether its from Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. It even supports upload via email and import from Google docs. Your files can be shared publicly  to all on the web or privately to some SlideShare users. You or the people your sharing the file with can even download your file in the same format as uploaded. Each presentation also comes with and embed code which can be used to embed it on blogs or other websites.

Accounts…
SlideShare started of with accounts for individuals but has recently launched 7 new account types for Companies, Non-Profits, Universities etc. So unlike before when companies created accounts and had to even specify DOB and gender of the company, now they can switch to the company account type where their profile page will have company specific options. Very soon SlideShare would be launching custom features for different account.

Networking…
SlideShare has a decent set of networking tools that you can leverage upon to build your social graph. You can follow like minded people to get their latest updates. You can favorite a presentation for future reference. You can create or join groups of users that share similar interests as you and interact with them by posting on the profile wall.

Widgets and Applications…
SlideShare has an simple interface to create Widgets and Presentation Packs that can be embedded on your blog or website to provide a feed of your presentations to your visitors. The Facebook and LinkedIn Applications allow you add a presentation gallery box on your profile and can be viewed by your connections.

Slidecasting…
Slidecasts are nothing but mashups of SlideShare presentations and streaming MP3.On SlideShare, in a few simple steps you can  create a Slidecast thus making your slides more meaning full and sending the right message to the viewers.

SlideShare Business…
SlideShare recently launched SlideShare Business that provides a new way to reach professional audience, connect with more and the right people by advertising your content to them. With AdShare you can promote your content to a community of professionals, by displaying your document next to documents on SlideShare that are from the same category or of similar content. LeadShare converts your content visitors into leads by enabling you to add a lead form within your presentations. This is more like a replacement of the traditional white paper and micro site campaigns.

You may find many file storing/sharing applications online, but the wide variety of features and the huge open community that you can share your content with makes SlideShare a great social media channel to try out.

This post originally appeared on Xoriant’s Blog, this is my 1st contribution to their official Blog.

Over the past decade the explosion of Social Networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has drastically changed the way how people interact socially.  The spectrum of its usability has grown widely since its inception, from users just building profiles and making friends to businesses using it for branding & interacting with their consumers, recruitment firms to find potential employees, science communities for exchange of ideas, non-profits for spreading social good and by students & teachers as a communication tool.This growth in its usability is due the hundreds of millions of active users together spending billions of minutes everyday on these sites building profiles, making status updates, uploading photos and building social graphs making them information rich.

While these sites have built some of the best tools on the world wide web, the opening up of their product to developers via APIs in the past 3 years have spawned “developer ecosystems” that build applications over popular services like Twitter and Facebook that help a person do everything from network with travelers to play social online games. Given below is a brief of 3 Social Networking Developer Ecosystems that would help you to better understand your options.

Facebook:
Facebook launched the Facebook platform in May 2007 for application developers that provides a framework to develop applications that would render within facebook.com and interact with core Facebook features.  Simultaineously a markup language called the Facebook Markup Language(FBML) was also introduced that is used to give applications the Facebook “look and feel”  and hook into several Facebook integration points, including the profile, profile actions, Facebook canvas, News Feed and Mini-Feed.  Since then, tens of thousands of applications have been built on top of the Facebook platform. Later on, Facebook Query Language (FQL) was introduced that allows you to use a SQL-style interface to  query Facebook social data without using the API. While most platforms force developers to use iFrames if they want to embed javascript within the application, Facebook answered this question with the introduction of FBJS that allowed developers to manipulate markup on the fly, animation and AJAX making applications more dynamic. Today, Facebook has over 350,000+ applications that play a critical role in maximizing Facebook’s active user base. Being the most popular application on Facebook, “Farmville” currently has over 60 million monthly active users.

In late 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect that allows developers to let users login to their websites with their Facebook credentials. It even allows other Facebook features, like your friend list and friend invite features to be implemented on your website, which can in turn send data back to Facebook as News Feeds. With over 15K websites already utilizing Facebook Connect, it has now become a must have feature for every social website for 2 main reasons : (1) Users do not have to go through the process of registering on your website if they are a Facebook user, your website can directly pull info from the users Facebook profile and (2) Your web site gets tons of exposure on Facebook as the users actvities on your site get posted to his Facebook profile.

Facebook has even gone a step further in encouraging developers by introducing the fbFund where developers can submit their applications to qualify for investments to grow their venture.

Twitter:
Twitter is one of the best examples of an very Open API and has provided developers a opportunity to build a full-fledged business by using it. Within a short span of time this ecosystem has transformed into a mainstream phenomenon with the development of Twitter apps that do everything from managing your twitter profile to analyzing tweets for real world trends. The Twitter API is nothing but a simple service that provides RESTfull access to the Twitter database and activity streams. Twitter initially started of with the basic authentication by which developers send the users credentials in the header of the HTTP request. But this being insecure and difficult to track hence in early 2009 they integrated the OAuth pattern of integration into the REST API permitting users a seamless experience of login into a 3rd party website using their Twitter account.

Twitter lacks many features in its pursuit of for simplicity and this gives openings to developers to fill the holes. Currently around 80% of Twitter’s usage is via 3rd party apps. and the Twitter API has 10x the traffic of its website. Twitter does not have 300+ million active user but it has momentum, excitement and virility which can cause your application to go from zero to a million users in a matter of days or weeks. Twitter is fast growing and new features are getting added regularly, requiring your application to adapt to it at the same time. A major problem with the Twitter ecosystem is its stability, so you have to make sure that your application doesn’t break and throw heaps of code when the API is down.

MySpace:
MySpace first got into the platform party by teaming with Google and a number of other social networks against the Facebook platform and releasing OpenSocial in November 2007, which were a set of API’s that would make applications interoperable with any social network system that supports it. The patnership spearheaded an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. Later on in early 2008 MySpace  independently launched the MySpace Developer Platform(MDP) that supports the OpenSocial model to enhance the overall experience of users through the development of Social Applications.

MySpace has undertaken a recent expansion of their platform through the MySpaceID project. MySpaceID provides Developers the opportunity to access user identities within the context of third-party environments. The main components of the MySpace platform are pretty similar to that of Facebook, but since MySpace supports the OpenSocial model the same application can be ported to any other social network with just a few minor tweaks to the code. With just around 15k apps in the MySpace apps Gallery and just a few websites integrating with MySpaceID, the Facebook ecosytem emerges as the clear winner in this case.

No doubt that these 3 ecosystems are the best and most established but they aren’t the only ones. Networks like Bebo, Yahoo, Friendster and the recently launched Google Wave have opened up their set of API’s that would allow you to reach millions of users through your applications. All these platforms are fast-growing and frequently-changing for the good, so as a developer even though you have a lot of choice with the ecosystems, it is suggested that you pick one ecosystem that you are a big fan of and program for it as keeping pace with all the ecosystems would be a real challenging task.

References : Mashable

The Internet turned 40 last week. Its been more than 2 yrs now that I have been a web developer and that makes the Internet the source of my bread and butter. I have now been a part of teams that have built some of the best websites on the net. But i would like to make an confession here, untill today,  I did not know how the Internet was born and how it evolved over the years and am even sure 9 out 10 developers too wouldn’t know even a bit of the history. So lets take a look on how the internet was born and how it has come of age.

Birth and Naming…

The research and development of the Internet spanned over 10 years and hence no exact date can be attributed to its birth, but the day October 29, 1969 stands as the first 2 nodes of what became ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International in Menlo Park, CA on this day. Based on ARPA’s research packet switching network standards were developed in the form of X.25 by ITU. Later on UUCPnet was developed with the idea of using simple Bourne Shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line. TCP/IP unified the different network standards and became an important communication protocol for the internet. The term “internet” was coined in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol in 1974(5 years later)  as an abbrevation of the term “internetworking”. To keep it simple “any network using TCP/IP was internet“.

The first steps…

The progress in the 1st 12 years were really slow with only 213 computers being connected to the ARPANET network. From the mid 70’s to the mid 80’s Internet’s technologies spread world wide and many new applications(Email, telenet, compuserve etc.) were developed for it out of the interest of many researchers in wide spread networking. Email became the most important and highly looked up application as it reached 16m users in 1985. Although most of the basic application that made the internet were developed, it was still used mostly by techies, geeks in research labs and had not gained much public face.

Getting Young and Dynamic…

As the internet grew, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files which lead to projects like Gopher, WAIS, FTP archive list etc. but all these fell short of full filling the scaling requirements. In 1989, Tim Berners Lee invented the network based implementation of the hypertext concept via his project named World Wide Web. With the advent of the WWW things started moving faster and till today there has been no limit to the way the Internet is growing. With the arrival of web browsers and not to forget the browser wars that still goes on we had 500m+ users online by 2001.

Fast Forwarding to Today…

Today the internet has over 1.7 billion users most of whom cannot think of life without emails, social networking, chatting, gaming etc. Today it is more like a virtual but required addition to the basic necessities list of  food, clothing, shelter and education of most developed countries. I cannot think of a day without access   to the internet; if not on the PC then from my mobile. The Internet has change the way people interact and socialize, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. When the web was born it was just about digitizing content; web2.0 was driven by socializing, sharing content and has become the platform for the concept of linked data. Now concepts like Real-Time Web and Internet of Things are driving us into the Web3.0 generation.

I doubt 40 years ago anyone would have imagined that the successful connection between 2 nodes would go on to become one of the major and  fastest growing platforms in the field of technology. I would love to see how the internet evolves in the next 40 years but wouldn’t dare to imagine  coz whatever it may be, it will surely blow our imagination from today’s standpoint.