Sosius Blog
Introducing OpenSosius
When we first launched Sosius, we made a commitment to create a community of users who would partner with us to build the world's most flexible and extendable online collaboration and business social networking solution. For the past several months, we have been working round the clock to develop the most essential tool for making this happen - an API that we call 'OpenSosius.'With 'OpenSosius', developers can now build custom online and desktop applications on the Sosius platform. What's more, we'll soon be launching a way for developers to make their custom applications available to all Sosius members, as either shareware or premium services.
I am very excited about this release and cannot wait to see what nifty applications our users come up with.
Groups Get a Dashboard
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:
- group members: lists the members in the group
- shared items: which items have been shared to the group
- latest items: the latest content to be added or editing in the group.
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.
Import Contacts
You have always been able to invite members by manually entering their email address. Now the process is much easier because you are able to import your contacts from an online email account such as Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo. All you have to do is go to you "Network" page and then click on the "Import" button. You will then be able to enter your credentials for your email account provider. This will return you a list of all your contacts. The next step in the process is to select which contacts you wish to invite into your network.Reflections on 2007 and the exciting year ahead
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
Drag and Drop Moving
It is now possible to drag and drop items between folders. This is muchh easier than using the current cut and paste actions which are currently available. If you have selected the view items by either of the "Large Icon" or "Thumbnail" views you will be able to use this new functionality. Just click on the item you want to move, hold the mouse key down and drag the item to the desired folder. When the target folder highlights drop the item into the folder by releasing the mouse button. The item will then be moved into the target folder.New Feature: The Expert Finder
Today I have some great news! Thanks to some nifty new tagging technology (and the amazing work of our chief architect, Murray), Sosius members can now search the entire Sosius community to find people who are experts in almost any field. We call this new feature “Expert Finder.” We hope it will be a valuable resource for all our users and a great way to network.The Expert Finder also allows you to market yourself as an expert. Simply by adding some keywords to your profile in the new “Expertise” and “Interests” fields, everyone in the Sosius Network can find you when they search on those terms. Please note though that we regard your privacy very seriously; you control how much information people can see through your personal settings, and the feature is switched off, by default, until you add your keywords.
We've created a new help page that gives further details about the new Expert Finder feature. Please check it out and let me know what you think!
Andrew Cameron-Webb
CTO & Founder
Finer Privacy Control
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:
- Profile: the textual description you write about yourself,
- Details: sensitive information such as age, gender, company and URL,
- Contact info: phone numbers, address, instant messaging clients,
- Messaging: who can contact you,
- Network: who can see your network.
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.
Tags now supported
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.
Berlin Web 2.0 Expo Review
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.
Improved Invites
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".
