Sweettt.com (with triple T’s)Living on the bountiful net

This is a Drupal installation. And because of that, this site provides me with the platform to handle lots of functions. The trouble is that many of those functions are not installed yet. For example, there is no native rich text editor in the default package. So if I want to make something bold, I have to use markup, like < s t r o n g >; And that’s a hassle. If this site was a wiki, then lots of the basic markup that I would use (lists, indents, bullets, & links) would be much easier to manage. However, I would sacrifice more fundamental aspects of a good content management platform, such as user account management, comment threading, and some level of extensibility.

Photo by – Arsart

Picked up on TechMeme, Google announced yesterday that it would provide OpenSocial, described as a set of open APIs for building social computing applications across the net.

Now that mini apps have already covered everything from recipes to books to friends of friends on places like Facebook, there is a strong need for a means through which the typical end user can get their “about you” from Facebook, to Linked-In, Xing, Friendster, Blogger, and yes, even to the old-fashioned personal website (even though it’s driven by a CMS like Drupal, Wordpress, Mambo, Joomla, etc.) However, I don’t yet understand what this would be like in the hands of Google.

Relatively new to all this, it seems that Google is the grand master of mashable web services. I’m glad to see that they are rushing into the fray and providing a solution in this space. But does this mean that in order to use the service that one must have their content hosted by Google? Will the service be able to support the integration of content from other sites?

Today, if I want to grab the content from each application, I need to post a reader on one site and point it to content on another. If the content is available through syndication, then the connection can be made. Is that enough? What might the Google service introduce into that pattern?

Photo by – TonZ