(photo by Oliver Widder)

At Solution Grove we are always experimenting with new ways to interweave web applications. We previously have created a Facebook API suport package for OpenACS that allows supporting Facebook applications with an OpenACS backend server. I am now working on Facebook Connect support which will allow users of an OpenACS site to publish entries such as status updated and photos to their Facebook page from an OpenACS application.

The first application will be a simple blog that will allow the user an option of publishing the blog or a summary to their Facebook page.

The next development will be a general "Share" button to allow any OpenACS content to put shared with Facebook users. 

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(photo by FABIOLA MEDEIROS of flickr)

Jeff Atwood is frustrated with web sites that timeout a session and lose the data that was typed into a form. There is a huge comment thread discussing the various ways around this.  Most of them are overly complex and try to use tricks like refreshing the page using AJAX. The simple answer of course is, don't lose the user's work.

Some commenters say you should just lock your computer, but that obviously is not appropriate in all situations. Short session timeouts are not the right answer for all situations either. 

Sessions timeouts are necessary for security in some applications, most people know about online banking, and really any application that expects users from a shared computer. The developers and administrators of a site need to balance security and usability and decide on the right session timeout.

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(photo by mattkeefe of flickr)

David Wiley posts about fully distributing the social network. This basically means empowering blogs or other personal Web sites to make the connections directly, without a centralized service such as Facebook.  One of the ideas that makes this work is URLs are people, too. 

Standards like OpenID, XFN, and  hCard can be used to tie all of this together.  The DISO-Project is working on the code to make this happen now. They are starting by building on Wordpress, but any Web platform should be able to support these formats.

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(photo by FrameSniper)

Cesar Brea pointed out Bill Ives' post, "Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet."

We've created corporate intranets (demo site showing off what we did for Cesar's company) and Facebook apps so we've thought about this.  I think the key to what Serena has done is using Facebook as a front end but having the intranet itself on a private and secure system.  Then, you have the best of both worlds.  Facebook becomes the watercooler, an open place for employees and friends to interact, while corporate documents and work discussions take place on a private system with controlled access.

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(photo by Facebook)

Solutiongrove is pleased to announce that we have comitted the Facebook API Package code authored by Dave Bauer to the OpenACS Community. The code for the package is now available on CVS HEAD.

In addition, we have upgraded the Friend Webs Facebook application to use ExtJS 2.0 while adding the following new features:

• the ability to create, edit, and save your own Friend Webs
• mini-feed publishing of user actions
• viewing a friend's webs

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(photo by smellyknee)

We have been interested in Open Courseware and other open leanring resources for a long time now. Dave Bauer and Caroline Meeks attended the Open Education Conference in 2006 and we were inspired.

Time and again research in education show that people learn better when they work together, and as we work with OpenACS, the obvious place to help would be to build communities around open lear(ning materials, but it seemed tricky to build a critical mass of users to make the community successful. Ideally users would form their own groups and help each other take advantage of these resources.

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