Tag Archive for 'opensocial'

Working for Hyves in Amsterdam

Published
by
Kasper Souren
on 2008-01-07
in Amsterdam, Hyves, Italy, free software, hospitality exchange and social networks
. 1 Comment

Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I’ve been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the  three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to  Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member. Most of these members live in the Netherlands; the majority of young people in the Netherlands have a Hyves account and many are actively using it. Officially I will start working for Hyves on the 1st of February.

There is a Hyves API (currently beta, mostly in Dutch) and will be implementing OpenSocial and some more very exciting technology. I will have to limit the time I spend on other projects but the contract I signed is quite liberal (e.g. compared to this one for CouchSurfing volunteers). On top of that, Hyves actively participates in the development of Gentoo Linux.

This weekend there will be a party in Trento.  I’m moving next week, I will attend the first BeWelcome (un)conference in Antwerpen on the 19th and 20th, and I already found some places to live in Amsterdam.

I grabbed RealSocial.org

Published
by
Kasper Souren
on 2007-12-01
in RealSocial.org
. 7 Comments

Social networks are hot. MySpace, Facebook. Google recently wanted to open the market with its OpenSocial. Which made me think, are these efforts really social? Is Facebook a real social network? I think not

So I grabbed realsocial.org which is currently just an alias. But I will put up a wiki with my (and your?) ideas about what real social networks are. I’m thinking of distinguishing Real Social and real social networks.

I’d consider CouchSurfing, BookCrossing, and all current ride share websites that I’m aware of, as real social networks. They lead to real life connections or actual forms of exchange, with less time spent offline than online.

I could think of three that would fit my criteria for being Real Social: BeWelcome, Ripple and Hitchwiki.  The capitalization comes from the way the networks, its organization and the software is developed.