We have recently added support for two internet standards: XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and Friend of a Friend (FOAF). Your profile and network pages have been updated to include these two new features. XFN and FOAF work together to publish in a machine readable way (i) who you are connected to and (ii) details about yourself. In both cases we respect the privacy settings in your account so that only information you have declared to be public will be published.
XFN is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. Any links in your Sosius profile to contacts in your network will be marked up with a XFN tag. This will allow other applications to determine who you are connected to. This information will only be made available to outsiders if you have set you Network privacy to "Public".
FOAF is a simple vocabulary for describing yourself and your social network. It is designed to be machine-readable so web applications and other software can discover information about you and your activities and connections. Once again, we only show information that is already publicly available in your profile. If you look to the bottom of your profile page you will see a FOAF icon which is a link to your FOAF file.
We have recently expanded the capabilities of our widgets system. Widgets can now be display on Group homepages as well as Item pages and your Dashboard. We have restrospectively upgraded all of your groups to show a standard set of widgets:
These three widgets will help you keep abreast of all that is going on in the group.
Furthermore, if you own the group then you can customise the widgets to better suit your requirements: change their formats, ordering or show more items. If you would rather that group members were not able to see who else is in the group - just remove it from the group homepage.
We think that these changes will make groups much more useful to you.
I hope that the new year has gotten off to a great start for everyone. Life here at Sosius is certainly hectic but very exciting as we look ahead to a pivotal year in our history. Looking back on 2007, I am quite pleased that we reached some major milestones. We launched the beta version of Sosius in September and managed to attract a brilliant member base that is now heading toward 10,000 users! We introduced the Expert Finder as a foundation for our business social networking capabilities and released the alpha version of our API to empower the developer community to create endless new features and applications that will extend the Sosius suite. 2008 is shaping up to be an even more exciting year as our membership explodes and our technology reaches new heights.
It goes without saying that none of this would be possible without the support and input of our members. We are constanting receiving invaluable feedback - from very positive comments to excellent suggestions for improvement - and I am personally very grateful for all of it. I am confident that 2008 will be a stellar year for Sosius. There is no question in my mind that we are building the #1online collaboration and business social networking community.
Andrew Cameron-Webb
Sosius Founder & CTO
You now have greater control over who sees what of your data because we have just added some extra areas where you can configure privacy settings. You now have control over the following areas:
We have configured the new areas (Details, Contact info and Network) to have sensible defaults so you needn't worry about your data being opened up to too many people. Only your network will be able to see your details and contact info. Your extended network will be able to see the people you have in Your Network.
Sosius now supports tagging on all items. Tagging allows you to associate keywords with an item. You may wish to apply categories or location information to a particular item. For example, you might apply the tags "Conference", "Finance", "New York" to an event.
Once you have applied tags to a number of items, you are then able to filter the items by selecting tags. Tagging allows you to mark up information the way you want to and then to recall it using terms you have specified. For example, you could filter to find all items with the "Conference" and "New York" tags.
Everytime you create or edit an item you can apply tags to it. You will also see a "My Tags" line in the footer of the page. It lists all the tags you have applied and allows you to then manage (add, edit, delete) them by clicking the "manage" link.
You can view all of your tags by clicking the Tags link in the top navigation bar. This will take you to a page where you can start filtering all of the items you have tagged.
To find out more on the general concept of tagging please read the Tag entry at Wikipedia.
Just back from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. While I enjoyed my time there, I found the show to be pretty disappointing. It was held at the Berlin Fairground, which is a huge, cold, concrete building that makes you feel like a student again - or maybe it was just the bad coffee and cigarette smoke. A lot of the speeches were of the ‘pat on your back’ type which I found dull, though the following speeches were noteworthy:
David Recorden’s talk on Opening The Social Graph.
Kathy Sierra’s talk on Creating Passionate Users was fantastically insightful. I learned a lot of good stuff which we will be putting into practice.
Mark Boulton’s talk on Better Typography
James Kalbach’s talk on Designing Tag Navigation
And best of all was Jeremy Keith’s talk on Microformats: the Nanotechnology of the Semantic Web – an excellent speech that got me all excited about using Microformats on Sosius.
After my visit to Berlin I couldn’t help but feel that Europe has a long way to go to catch up to the current Web 2.0 buzz you see in the US. We’ll just have to wait and see if next year’s European Web 2.0 expo will be up to scratch.
The invite process on Sosius has now been improved. It is possible to send out a short welcome message to the new users you are inviting into a group or an item.
To see this improvement in action for groups, click on "Groups" in the top bar, select the Group you wish to invite members into and then click "Add Group Members". Alternatively, to share an item with new users, navigate to the item you wish to share, click on the "Item Options" drop down box in the top right hand side of the page and then select "Share this item with others".
All users are now logged in via HTTPS. ie. the username and password are encrypted by default when logging in. It is no longer necessary to go to the HTTPS version of our login page to have secure login - it happens automatically.
Sosius now will customise the display of dates and times according to the language settings in your browser. If the setting is for en-gb, en-au, en-nz and a couple of others, the date format will be British format: dd/mm/yyyy. If you have en or en-us specified then the format will now be mm/dd/yyyy. Other languages will default to the US format.
The date format applies to the display of all dates as well as the entry and validation of dates in forms.
We have now added better timezone support across Sosius. Instead of displaying the time of the server, all times will now be adjusted for the timezone which you have set in your preferences. To edit your timezone, just go to My Account and click on the Edit Settings link.
Also, when you go to create certain items such as a blog entry, the automicatically created date and time which makes up the title will be for your timezone. In the case of an event, where the timezone is specified by the creator of the event, the time will continue to show as the time entered.
"There is truly some justice in the world! The developers at Sosius, the inaccessible website I ranted about in my last posting, has taken my concerns about accessibility to heart. Two days after my initial experience with them they have added a number of new features which now make the site accessible to both sighted as well as blind users." -bostonmargy
To read her full posting, please go to: http://bostonmargy.livejournal.com/14351.html
We officially launched the beta version of Sosius at the Office 2.0 show in San Francisco that took place from September 5-7. The response to our service was overwhelming. Our demo pod was one of the busiest at the show and we have had a slew of sign-ups since then.
Thanks to everyone who waited patiently for us to go live with our service - now please tell us what you think of Sosius and how we can make it even better!
Welcome to the Sosius Beta blog
The Sosius team will be adding our thoughts and updates on development progress to this blog so please remember to check back frequently.
Andrew Cameron-Webb
Founder & CTO
Posts: 53. Page 2 of 2.