When you just want to move information around and don't need to get all social about it 

You know, it's really kind of stupid for most people and organizations who publish on the web to get so caught up in building social applications when in a lot of cases it's just information you want to distribute in different ways in different places. But maybe you want to pretty it up a little more than simply outputting the text from a feed. There's no reason to pretend it's "social" in many publishing scenarios, and with the types of simple republishing I'm interested in it's pretentious and overkill to even term the effort an application.

This occurred to me after I got my feet wet experimenting with converting a Google Gadget to become an OpenSocial app, then went looking around for OpenSocial partners that have already exposed a way for users to add the shared apps. MySpace doesn't seem to have anything ready yet. NetVibes doesn't either, but in looking at that start page for the first time in over a year, I discovered that you can make a widget by entering a URL of a web page that's designed to look right as a sidebar item or mobile page.

And then I started to feel kind of silly. To offer something for NetVibes users, there's no reason for me to go through the rigmarole of wrapping it in the trappings of an application. Here's my NetVibes page as a screenshot because I'm not sure you can link to your customized page.

I'm used to thinking of bits of web pages in this way because the CMS I use for work, Expression Engine, does things that way. For example, this sidebar item

... is a separate template in EE that has its own URL, and may be embedded within another EE template like this. And it can be repurposed as a sidebar widget that automatically changes every week, for different spots on our site or on a member's or partner's site.

Similarly, the weekly newsletter content can take different shapes by using different templates. Here's the same newsletter, but it's output for mobile or sidebar use.

So, what am I trying to say? For a lot of purposes (when there's no compelling reason to get all social about it), we don't have to make it so hard to distribute and repurpose information. It just doesn't have to be very complicated. More blog software could modularize its pieces like EE does. And on the receiving end, more sites (and blog software too) could do what Netvibes does and make it simple to let these teeny web pages become parts of an encompassing page.

You wouldn't need VCs or monetization schemes. It could just start happening. So it probably won't.

That was pretty easy: trying OpenSocial in Ning  

If you already have made a Google Gadget, it's easy to make it part of Google OpenSocial. I tried it in Ning, because Ning lets you right in when you've made a network there. You have to wait to be approved to join Google's Orkut sandbox.

The two or three Google Gadgets I'd made before don't do anything social, they just show some content in an iframe. But that's probably what I'd do if I wanted to make an OpenSocial app for work, maybe display a safety fact of the week from existing sidebar content in an e-mail newsletter, something like that. I don't know if I'd try to take advantage of the multi-page aspect. Maybe.

So here's what I did:

Added a line

- To my existing Latest TwitterGrams gadget I added a section

- <Require feature="opensocial-0.5"/>

- You put it within ModulePrefs

- Documented at Google here

At Ning

- Made a social network at Ning. I already had a Ning account from a year ago or so, when Ning was being positioned more as a place for newbie or psuedo developers than a PeopleAggregator-like, roll-your-own socnet place.

- In the socnet, went to the Manage tab, Features config. Dragged Gadget (Beta) element to a place on the layout grid.

- On my socnet home, added the gadget by pasting in the URL of my existing modified Google Gadget XML file.

- See it in the upper left of my sandbox network.

- Here's Ning help.

I haven't added it to any directories yet in case I've done something naive. That's always a very real possibility for anything coming out of my computer. ;-) In fact, though I know this is an ultra-simple example, it was so easy I keep thinking it was too easy -- and that I've completely missed something that will embarrass me and cause me to nuke this post later this morning! That's what you have to risk when you're just a masherupper and not a real programmer.

Later: MissM reports on my Ning sandbox forum there is a formatting problem with the gadget. I think a lot of the cosmetic aspects are not going to be completely plug-and-play, or will require some futzing that I'm not all that into engaging in just now. Another day, perhaps. It's Sunday after all and I'm coming down with the sniffles and I really must zone out on more MI-5 episodes.

Still later: It didn't take too long for the Orcut sandbox access request to be processed. A few hours on a Sunday. That's not too bad.