Google has just announced that its powerfully social Friend Connect features are now available for open-source content management systems Drupal and Joomla . Google Friend Connect (GFC) allows sites with these CMSes to integrate many social features without having to write any code. The impact of the integration has the potential to be significant, as Drupal in particular is one of the most widely-used content management systems in use on the Web today, powering sites from WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.gov to TheOnion.com and websites for celebrities and musicians like Britney Spears and Eric Clapton. Joomla is used by such institutions as Harvard, MTV and Citibank. Sponsor Friend Connect essentially allows site visitors to become site members by using profile information from services such as Google, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. With user accounts authenticated via OpenID, site administrators can add Friend Connect’s social bar, a site members gadget, the Friend Connect comments gadget or recommendations in any part of the site they choose. In addition to adding social gadgets, Friend Connect also allows site admins to conduct polls, monitor community growth, create and distribute email newsletters, run ads through AdSense, export user data for a site’s entire community (as XML or JSON) or create their own apps using the GFC APIs . “Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins,” writes developer and open-source aficionado Mauro González in Google’s Social Web blog post. “Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features – all without writing a single line of code.” GFC represents an interesting – and perhaps underused – suite of tools in an increasingly competitive space. Many site owners are adding social features to blogs and sites through systems such as JS-Kit’s Echo or Disqus , and Joomla and Drupal both have many extensions and plugins to allow for the same kinds of features and functions. Still, making GFC available for the CMSes that power many highly visible sites around the Web might do a lot of good for that product. Overall, we see this announcement as indicative of a set of trends: Portable user identities, highly interactive content, portable communities and open-source software. What do you think: Will more site users be integrating Friend Connect to allow for more social website experiences? Let us know your opinions in the comments. Discuss

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Google Brings Friend Connect, Social Features to Drupal & Joomla

In a blog post from 2006 titled, ” The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy ,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki wrote, “you cannot drive your competition crazy unless you understand their strengths and weaknesses.” Kawasaki undoubtedly knows what he’s talking about, and his advice – while almost 4 years old – still rings true today. If you’ve got a great idea for a startup, knowing as much about your potential competitors is invaluable, and the people behind Competitious know this as well as anyone. That’s why they created their handy application for keeping close tabs on the competition. Sponsor Developed by RivalSoft, the makers of RivalMap , Competitious is a free service that allows users to collaborate on numerous projects for tracking industry competitors. You and your team can gather and collect news clips, build feature comparison matrices and keep an eye on traffic trends with Alexa data. The comparison matrix feature is very useful and we here at ReadWriteWeb are even putting this feature to use in researching an upcoming report. However, entering in individual features for each company can become a bit tedious. It would have been nice to see Competitious offer a list of popular companies whose core features could be automatically placed into a matrix. Users would also benefit from suggested competiors for any given company based on what other users are comparing, but perhaps these features are on Competitious’ roadmap for the future. The traffic graphs can only be seen if your competitors are ranked in the top 100,000 on Alexa, which can be a problem for small business with equally small competition. Competitious does claim, however, that they are working on “a much more robust traffic system” for their post-beta release. In the meantime, free site analytics services like Compete and Quantcast can provide data for those hard-to-reach sites. Despite its early flaws, with the ability to easily compare any number of companies in a side-by-side fashion, Competitious is a convenient solution for researching that “competitors” slide in your startup’s pitch presentation. Discuss

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Know Thy Enemy: Competitious Helps You Stay Ahead

A few weeks ago, I spoke to someone who had finally reached the end of her rope with an obdurate boss. Having suggested a series of social media initiatives, only to see them wither on the vine as he refused to either push them forward or cancel them, she was ready to move on – not just to another job, but a whole different organization. (Possibly the mob. She has recently dreamed up some innovations on the homicide front that she’s eager to try.) Sponsor One of the reasons social media can be so challenging is that it often challenges hierarchies… and people at the top of those hierarchies have grown comfortable there. Some see the potential advantages of an engaging, open online presence, but others feel threatened and vulnerable. They have a wide range of hostile responses at their disposal: from the passive-aggressive (my friend’s boss) to the outright belligerent (see below). What’s your experience? Have you found yourself inadvertently threatening the powers that be? More Noise to Signal. Discuss

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Cartoon: Head Count

Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter , a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com. MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud , an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com. Sponsor MindTouch Cloud is meant for a business community to create their own dashboards. It allows users to collaborate with a familiar wiki environment with the capabilities of an enterprise platform. It’s also another example of how enterprise technologies are increasingly designed so the average business user may perform tasks that have traditionally been the domain of the IT department. What differentiates MindTouch from Sharepoint and other services is its emphasis on the data. Users may collaborate across multiple enterprise systems and web applications. MindTouch Cloud is an enterprise mashup service. Business critical information can be exported from enterprise systems and mashed up to create reports and build applications. It has the requirements for the enterprise, including authentication using LDAP, single-sign on security. Role management is built into the service with the capability to create new users, roles and groups. Compare that to Salesforce Chatter and you see some similarities in how applications can be integrated to create an intelligent dashboard environment that fits into an enterprise environment. MindTouch does need some work on its user interface. But it has all the features that can make it a valuable service for a business looking to build dashboards that can mashup enterprise data and external applications. This is MindTouch’s first cloud computing effort. Pricing starts at $7 per user per month. Discuss

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MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?