Google isn’t waiting for the others to move forward and this seems to the be the motto for most areas of the web involving connecting with users and building a new fundamental tool. Their latest creation is a virtual online world going by the name “Lively” which runs in the browser as a plugin (currently only on Windows XP and Vista machines). The download is just over 400KB so that went quickly and the installation was just as easy.

You then get to choose a room (currently there are only seperate rooms just like in a chat room) to enter and you sign up with your google login. Your room loads up in the background and you get to choose your very own avatar look and if you decide to get mroe involved you can customize this figure as well. It all doesn’t stop right there. You can choose from a growing catalog of avatars, outfits, furniture, and rooms to create your own chat room and embed it on your own website. At the moment only a selected group of trusted testers, vendors and creative agencies are allowed to create new items but Google mentions in the Lively help page that they hope to enable user-generated content and even more customization in the future.

The navigation through the rooms occurs with either the keyboard or mouse and you have the possibility to set up the way the view works: avatar’s view, bird’s eye view or with the viewfinder.

I’ll be checking this out in more detail soon, try it yourself over at

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FriendFeed, a site which enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing, tries to attract new users through it’s claim that their site offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends. Okay, so what is the brand new way to attract users? News feeds have become an essential part of many of our lives - I couldn’t get the amount of work done in a day that I do right now without them.

The interesting part about FriendFeed is that it creates a feed with the news, interests and activities they have been up to lately. All you have to do is connect them together which is what we want in the long run so that we don’t have to spend a lot of time reading through many pages. Some days you just don’t have the time so a feed is an intelligent and time-saving alternative. What makes the whole idea even better is that your friends can share their thoughts and comments in the same feed so you can put all of the information in one place.

Now FriendFeed is opening up their application to developers with their new FriendFeed API which allows programmers to interact with the site programmatically. So the featrues can be taken and built into a mobile phone application, a widget for a blog or whatever the imaginative minds out there can build with social network features. Python and PHP client libraries have been made available so if this is up your alley, there’s nothing stopping you now.

FriendFeed website
FriendFeed Blog
FriendFeed API documentation

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That’s right, Yahoo! is joining up with Google and MySpace to announce an agreement to form the OpenSocial Foundation to pave the path for a specification which is open and community-governed that will create a framework for building social applications across websites. This is a large developemnt as the potential for developers is immense: over 500 million people worldwide will be able to be reached through social applications and it is not shrinking in size.

The OpenSocial Foundation itself will be a non-profit and independently run organization which will “provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform” according to the press release.

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Google continues its acquisition and return-with-new-product approach on the web, this time with the long expected - 16 months now - Google Sites, a hosted wiki platform which can be used to build collaborative web sites. Sixteen months after Google acquired JotSpot, they’ve put it back online integrated into their Google Apps products suite. The whole idea is not a bad one at all. It has always been a problem for projects and companies working together to keep all of the necessary information together, to see who has made changes to documents and when and to keep this information at your fingertips at any computer in the world with an internet connection.

The idea of collaboration on the net is nothing new but the approach Google is using is more than interesting for the future with social-networking capabilities being put into the entire picture which Google is creating. The look and feel of the JotSpot application was adapted to the Google Apps Suite and as with JotSpot, Google Sites currently offers five page types and more should be added in the future. And to make sure that Google Sites takes advantage of many of Google’s other gadgets, APIs and iGoogle gadgets will be able to be embedded in this service. At the moment there is no databank connectivity which is a definite problem for larger collaboration groups but the system is at the beginning and Google doesn’t seem to be slowing down just yet.

Go to Google Sites to try it out and make your own opinion about this new product. Make sure to let us know what you think!

More about Google Sites:

Webware: Don’t call it a wiki: Google Sites finally launches
cNet News.com: JotSpot reincarnated as Google Sites
TechCrunch: It Took 16 Months, But Google Relaunches Jotspot

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