SocialBeans.org - Compatibility Among Social Platforms

This new initiative takes the building blocks of the social web as its starting point, and it intends to create a framework that guarantees portability across social media publishing platforms. As they say on the site, “Social Beans aims to bring a syntax which is specific to the social web”.

As it stands right now, each feature that you can see on social sites is the result of proprietary technology 9 out 10 times. Rating systems, wikis, tags… the end result is the same, but the actual implementation differs from social site to social site. Standardizing it all is a sound idea from every point of view, and the advantages such an approach could have are obvious. If every person who is into the social sphere shared the same syntax, then time would be saved and the rate at which developments come about would be a steadier one.

While it is an interesting concept, it remains to be seen whether or not it can gain the necessary traction and be accepted by the community of developers. Personally, I think it is the right time for such a project - the “social” concept has established itself, and the obvious step now should be giving uniformity to what we already have before rushing ahead at full throttle.

“Social Beans is a community effort to establish Skeleton Portability across social media publishing platforms. It is an open standard that outlines the building blocks of the social web. Social Beans aims to bring a syntax which is specific to the social web. After all, the question is why do we keep reinventing the wheel, writing social applications with very low level languages such as HTML and PHP? It’s like creating a web page with Assembly Code.”

It is the right time for such an initiative to materialize – we have gone quite a distance in social terms, and it would be nice to sit down for a second and figure out how we got there.

What chances has such a project of being widely accepted and adopted?