When I joined Intel in 2000, many people were speaking in code. Not HTML, AJAX or C++, but using acronyms in between other English words. The English words…sure I got most of those, but BMK, FSB, SERP? WTF?!! One acronym I got immediately was that email from Andy Grove with these three letters: NFW. I think a simple no would’ve provide more brevity, yet surely less passion.
We’re all hearing about API and other social computing jargon (that’s what it is for many of us) about how we’ll be able to better interconnect our social media and social networking tools. For me, Facebook started the mad rush. Everyone’s creating applications that allow you to use things like Twitter, WordPress, Clipmarks, Flickr and other programs while you’re inside Facebook. It allows you to syndicate or unify the many Web 2.0 tools you use. I LOVE THIS STUFF!!
That’s why 2008 will be a year where we all find new reasons to use new socially juiced programs and fuse them together so we can aggregrate and feed content, but more importantly…so we can grow our social graph = connect to our friends and contacts through any social computing program we use. Unifying and empowering every tool you use at any particular time. Everything, everyone at your finger tips. Better connecting, feeding and growing our social graphs.
Here’s a geeky video from Google describing what’s going on under the hood, driving new possiblities thanks to Open Social and the wonders of API (sure, we’ll have to tackle the ethical/privacy issues over time):
Movin' Ahead 