OpenSocial is now live at profiles.ucsf.edu!

We launched OpenSocial into production on February 28th, 2011. Just a week before our poster presentation at an AMIA conference and our timing could not have been better. It is so much easier to talk about the value of our work when we have a real example to show! Presentations are a great way to get the word out but actions speak louder than presentations, and seeing the live product answers a lot of the unspoken questions many people seem to have when the hear about our work.

Now that UCSF Profiles is live with OpenSocial we need to make our code available to the other Profiles installations so they can start to play with what we have developed. It is my opinion that the best way to grow a 'gadget library of bioinformatic applications' is to create more authors, and that will happen as soon as others are able to install our code.

The other frontier is integrating with other research networking tools, in particular VIVO. Future versions of Profiles will be more aligned with VIVO, and this will affect our work in a way that will make our code easier to adopt by VIVO. The groups who are currently running the VIVO product seem very interested in what we are now doing, and seem happy to hear that our work will become easy for them to adopt. Let's hope that happens, and soon.