Posts Tagged ‘Wikia’

Environmental problems, issues and solutions will always be a hot topic in both the online and offline world. There’s probably thousands or more websites catering to green computing, green marketing and everything else that you can probably attached with environmental or green contents. But despite the dearth of “green” information resources – blogs, social networks, video contents etc, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales did not mind it and launches a green version of his open-source encyclopedia and calls it Wikia Green. Read more

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has pointed out that Wikia has launched the open source version of their SocialProfile toolset. This toolset provides the basic features of a social network profile including “avatars, friending, foeing, user board, board blast and basic profile information.” If you install MediaWiki on your servers, you will immediately have access to the social network features. Alternatively, you could hack up your own social network with the social network database structure and functions provided by MediaWiki.

This is a similar model to Ning who has opened up their code and has made it available for others to use. While I’m not quite sure that having a wiki is critical to all social networks, having social features embedded within them definitely is. While I’m not sure that this new release is as big of a move as Marshall Kirkpatrick has hyped it up to be, I definitely think that the movement toward open sourcing all of the social components of a site definitely is.

This is part of the overall trend toward data portability and I think that we will see other companies make similar moves. The concept is simple, you can use “our” company’s data to make your tools more useful as long as you don’t compete. If you ever come within striking distance of us, we will force you to sign an agreement stating that you will not compete. I have a feeling that this is what Facebook will do when they eventually open up the social graph. I’ll leave that concept for another post. For now, check out some screenshots of the SocialProfile service:

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