Widget Wednesday launched, a distributed hackathon for Widgets and Mashups

By Ross Mayfield | November 5, 2008, 8:00 am | 0 Comments

Also releases its OpenSocial widgets as Open Source

PALO ALTO, CA – November 5, 2008 – Socialtext, the Enterprise Social Software leader, today announced it will host Widget Wednesday on November 12, a distributed hackathon for widgets and mashups. Socialtext partners Box.net, Denodo, Newsgator, Meebo, Six Apart, Slideshare and others will participate in the hackathon to develop OpenSocial standard-based widgets and mashups on the Socialtext platform. Socialtext also announced that it will release all of the widgets it develops under an Open Source license — to help partners, customers and developer community members create mashups leveraging Socialtext’s best-in-class REST API.

“We look forward to participating in Widget Wednesday and enabling Slideshare widgets for sharing presentations with Socialtext users, ” said Slideshare CEO Rashmi Sinha. “Socialtext has a history of hosting community events like Barcamp and Dcamp that lead to great things and we are happy to be part of the developer community.”

Participation in Widget Wednesday is open to those who wish to join the developer community. At the end of the day, participants will be able to vote on the best widget created and the winner will receive a $300 gift certificate for Kiva.org. Participation details can be found at http://socialtext.net/wikiwed

Socialtext recently launched Socialtext 3.0, and is focusing on completing the business social software offerings, including: Socialtext Dashboard, Socialtext People, Socialtext Workspace, SocialCalc and Socialtext Signals. Socialtext does not plan to update or support the Socialtext Open wiki in the short-term for the distribution benefits of Open Source, to instead focus its immediate energies on core development and cultivating a larger development community with widgets and mashups. All widgets in Socialtext Dashboard conform to the OpenSocial standard for widgets. Widgets developed by Socialtext will be released under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

About Socialtext

As the Enterprise Social Software leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies to the critical challenges facing businesses. Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating tighter connections between employees, partners, and customers. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 4,000 customers world-wide, including BASF, Boston College, CondeNet, Epitaph Records, Humana, IKEA, Intel, MicroStrategy, MWW Group, Nokia, Ogilvy, SAP, Sunguard, Symantec, USA Today and Washington Post.

Socialtext’s flagship product, Socialtext Workspace, is the first enterprise wiki and the foundation of the social software platform. Socialtext People enables enterprise social networking. Socialtext Dashboard provides personalized and customizable widget-based interface for people and teams to manage activities. SocialCalc is the social spreadsheet for distributed teams. Learn more about Socialtext and how these innovative products are turned into solutions at www.socialtext.com.