The Social Desktop Winners

Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

There have been many new ideas and innovations coming from the community in the Social Desktop area and we received a large number of really good submissions. This made it obviously hard for the jury, as you can have only so many winners.

After combining the community votes with the votes from the jury we have 4 winners. We are especially trilled that the winning submission of the contest, the "ExtendedAboutDialog for KDE apps" is not only fully implemented and working, it already ships with Amarok 2.2! So you probably already have it on your hard drive...

So without further delay, we present the winners of the contest:

1st place - "ExtendedAboutDialog for KDE apps" by Téo Mrnjavac
This is an enhanced KAboutDialog which gets developers' data from openDesktop.org. It enables direct interaction with the development team and can be used in any KDE application.

Téo Mrnjavac has won a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v netbook with Ubuntu.

2nd place - "Knowledge base widget" by Marco Martin
This is a plasmoid which lets users query an online knowledge base for support without the need to visit a forum or subscribe to a mailinglist. This widget will be part of KDE 4.4.

Marco Martin won an external 1TB hard disk.

3th place - "libopengdesktop" by Guido Roberto
A simple Glib-oriented library which easy access to Open Collaboration Services providers. Still under heavy development, it will be useful for other people which want to bring the Social Desktop on Gnome and XFCE platforms.

Guido Roberto won an Amazon.com Gift Coupon worth $50.00.

4th place - "PyContent" by Ni2c2k
A plasma widget written in Python to show the newest contents from specific content categories from a content provider.

Ni2c2k has won an Amazon.com Gift Coupon worth $30.00.

Congratulations to all the winners from the jury members!

- Aaron Seigo from the KDE community
- Luis Villa from the GNOME project
- Alexandro Colorado from OpenOffice.org
- Frank Karlitschek from openDesktop.org

Bringing together APIs and people

We launched interesting new features on openDesktop.org lately and made progress on the Social Desktop. So I think I should blog about the news and give you all an overview over the cool new stuff and the plans for the next few month.

One idea is to integrate openDesktop.org, KDE-Look.org and KDE-Apps.org more with existing social networks and other services.

So if artist or developers publish their work on KDE-Look.org or KDE-Apps.org their friends and fans get notifications. We do this be integrating Microblogging like Twitter and identi.ca and by launching a Facebook App.

Microblogging

All new artwork and applications are published on this feeds

twitter.com/opendesktop

identi.ca/opendesktop

You can follow this feeds if you want to stay up to date about the latest stuff our community creates and develops.

Facebook

We have a new Facebook App. If you are an openDesktop and a Facebook user you can install this App on your Facebook profile. If you release a new application or artwork on KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org or any other openDesktop.org site the announcement will be automatically pushed to your Facebook page. Your Facebook friends get notified about your work. So this is OpenSource Marketing 2.0 :-)

Go to apps.facebook.com/opendesktop

Social Desktop Contest

The Social Desktop Contest is over. I must say that I´m very impressed by the work of all participants. Lots of great stuff was implemented and submitted. The contest also produced a lot of new ideas and concepts. I´m really looking forward to all the exiting new upcomming features.

It was a difficult choice but the jury members decided about the winner of the contest and I will announce the winners of the Netbook soon.

The Social Desktop in KDE 4.4

A lot of interesting stuff is coming together for KDE 4.4 and the Social Desktop idea. I think this will be a really great release where we begin so see the potential of the integration of people and social networking principals with desktop applications. I´m especially exited about the new GHNS uploading and downloading features. where Jeremy, Frederik and Eckhart are working on at the moment. This will be really powerful. Other Stuff like notification, friends management, messaging and fan management is also growing nicely.

We will also have a central place where users can configure their different content providers and identities. So every KDE application can access the social features in a transparent way without caring about providers, login or passwords.

I will give a talk at the Open Web Conference at the end of October. And I hope to give a preview about the new cool features there. You can find more information about the Open Web Conference here: www.nluug.nl/activiteiten/events/nj09/index-en.html

Event API

I´m constantly working on new API features. Today I published an improved version of the Event API. It is now possible to create, edit and delete events via the API. Read support is of course possible since a few month. This is useful for integration with other event databases, Desktop Widgets or even Akonadi. You can find the documentation here is you want to use the API: www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services

Social Desktop Sprint

I´m planing a Social Desktop Developer Sprint for later this year. We meet for 3 days here in Stuttgart and work on ideas and code together. Please send me a email if you want to participate. The KDE e.V. has probably some money for sponsoring.

By the way. A few days ago we reached a new traffic record on the openDesktop.org sites. Over 42000 simultaneous visitors. This is a really impressive number.

So if you want to help or have some ideas about the Social Desktop vision please don´t hesitate to send me an email.

Cheers

Frank