I’ve been contemplating for awhile now a good way to share what I know about Social Software Development and helping business owners, marketers, and developers learn how to set up their own social apps. Especially for developers, I know there are many out there looking for howtos and ways to learn more about starting their own App, promoting it, and getting it off the ground. As the author of FBML Essentials, I feel I am well suited for the task so in the next few days I’m going to start doing howtos and overviews on how you can get your own Apps together. If you’re “the business type”, I may get a little technical on you, but I do recommend you keep watching and forward these onto your IT personell - your CIO, CTO, and the like should read these so they can learn what’s possible to integrate into your existing environments. I’ll also try to throw in a little goodie here and there for “the business type”.

So, I’ve created a new category to the right, “Social Coding” - if you want to track just that, click on the category name and add it to your RSS. I’ve also started a new FriendFeed Room where those involved or that want to get involved in Social Coding can discuss, learn, and talk with each other. You can subscribe to that here.

Let’s start by going over the types of sites I could cover. Here are just a few - let me know if you have a particular interest in learning about how to code for any one in particular:

• Facebook
• OpenSocial
• Google Friend Connect
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Pligg
• Digg
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Wordpress
• MoveableType
• Google App Engine
• Bungee Connect

Stay tuned! I’ll keep posting news and other rants as we go forward - I’ll just be adding in some good howtos at the same time. Oh, and if you’re a developer and would like to do a howto in your preferred language for us, contact me - I’d love to let you do a guest post.

Matt Mullenweg, a fellow Houstonian and all around cool guy spoke to us today at Web 2.0 Expo about Wordpress’s present and future. Some features from the talk:

Wordpress has 2 main products, Akismet, and Wordpress.com. Akismet is solving many of the Spam problems Matt Cutts from Google talked about earlier, and Wordpress.com handles much of the “Software as a Service” suggestion Matt Cutts gave.

Wordpress.com has had a tremendous Growth. At their start, they had just 2 million uniques. This year, Wordpress.com is at 168 million unique visitors, all with only 20 employees.

Some featured Wordpress.com blogs that Matt Mullenweg likes:

• NY Times
• Flickr Blog
• Fail blog
• I can haz cheeseburger

99.999% of Wordpress.com blogs get less than 10k pages/day. They are all on a different model.

Matt had some great announcements. He mentioned that 40-45% of their traffic is going to permalink pages. Therefore they are introducing a new feature they call “(Possibly) Related Posts”. With this, Wordpress.com lists relevent links below each blog post, the first being links from your blog. Secondly, posts from the 300 million blogs hosted on Wordpress.com are displayed, then mainstream news sites are displayed - these are all opt-out. Matt mentioned they partnered and worked with the company Sphere to do this.

The coolest announcement of Matt’s was the announcement of a new theme called Monotone. Monotone automatically adapts its color scheme to the photos uploaded to to Wordpress. The idea is to adapt changes to the look and feel of your website based on what you’re doing, and every page changes as you move through the site - it was actually quite beautiful, and knowing that Matt is a very good Photographer I expect to see some cool things from that theme. I’m told Monotone will be released some time soon.

I mentioned this at the Hackathon in March, but have not had the time to blog about it yet. Thus far all announcements for the Utah Social Media Developers Garage Meetings and Utah Facebook Developers Garage Meetings have been announced either through this blog, or our Facebook Group. I’ve now created a Google Group for us at http://groups.google.com/group/utsmdev. Please sign up there and I’ll issue all announcements via that list. Google Groups provides a more neutral ground in the sense that users don’t have to have an account to use it (to an extent), as compared to the Facebook groups. We’ll keep the Facebook groups around, and depending on membership I’ll still send announcements there as well, but I encourage all to sign up on the Google Group if possible. In addition, having a mailing list will allow us to have more of a discussion. This way if you are working on a project in Facebook, or OpenSocial, or even Wordpress or Twitter or other APIs and you run into issues, you can ask the group and we can work together to solve the problem. I figure this way we’ll be able to all build a strong Social Media Development community here in Utah that others can rely on. Google groups will also give us a page we can tell others about the group, when the next meeting is, etc. If you have some graphics and HTML skills to help with that I am open to volunteers!

Also, I have created a Google Code repository at http://code.google.com/p/utsmdev/. For anyone okay with producing their code under the GPL, this will give you a place to store your code, and collaborate with others on the code, track issues, etc. If you want commit permissions to that repository please contact me and I’ll add you. As Google App Engine gets more integration into these things we’ll also set up a hosting option through Google App Engine to actually host your apps. Hopefully all these options will make it all much easier for everyone to get out and collaborate in their coding. It’s a good time to be a developer…

P.S. - We will continue on in our every-other-month meeting structure now, so our next meeting will be the second Tuesday in May. I’m working on a speaker, so if you know anyone or have ideas let me know!

Just today, Matt Mullenweg, founding developer and owner of Automattic, announced a new, open source, theme for Wordpress called Prologue. The theme essentially turns your blog into a “mini-Twitter”, with a “Whatcha up to?” text box at the top where your users can post what they are currently doing. This is an excellent way to build community on a site, just for your own users - it will be interesting, as cell phone networks open up, to see if there will be ways to integrate “mini-communities” such as this onto users’ cell phones. I also anticipate someone writing some sort of Twitter plugin that integrates with this theme, and I’d love to figure out a way to use this theme in conjunction with my current theme so I can add this as a link to my current blog.

The theme has been released as Open Source, completely free, under the GPL. The release of this reminds me very much of Google’s OpenSocial initiative, of which they are releasing platform code, very similar to the way Facebook’s platform works (Facebook is a very closed platform currently), for anyone and everyone to load onto their own blogs as they wish. Basically, you can “create your own Twitter” with this code they are releasing!

Joseph Scott, a very good friend of mine, was one of the writers of this and he’s going to give me a demo this Thursday - I’ll post a video of it when I’m done (unless someone wants to buy me an N95, which I’ll post live via Qik.com!). Matt Mullenweg will also be in town this Saturday and meeting with local bloggers and social media advocates - if I can make it work, I may try some video of that as well.