At the university where I work, we use Clearspace X for student communities that are moderated by faculty members. A new position, Director of Social Network Development, was recently created in our IT department, and I will be applying for it. In preparation for my application, here are a few pieces of information I've gathered regarding possible integration of Clearspace with social networks.

• Jive, with initial development by Face It!, recently released a  Facebook *Beta* Plugin for Clearspace 1.10x. In the  The specified thread was not found., Dawn said that plugin will need to be ported to Clearspace 2.0 before it can no longer be considered beta. The Facebook plugin integrates the users' Facebook profiles into their Clearspace profiles, while allowing each user to control how (or if) their Facebook information is shown.

• The  Flickr Slideshow macro displays a flickr slideshow in a Clearspace blog post, document, or discussion message.

• The  YouTube Macro makes it easy to display YouTube videos in Clearspace documents, blog posts, and discussion messages.

• Clearspace's  The specified document was not found. plugin helps you to scrape images from various social networks like MySpace, Socializer, etc.

• Clearspace's blog pinging will send a ping to weblogs.com, Google blog search, and Technorati if blog pinging is enabled when a new blog post is created/published on your system. By default it is disabled in Clearspace and enabled in Clearspace X.

• Windows Live Writer can be used to publish Clearspace blog posts.

• In  What does Google and Facebook's validation of DataPortability mean for the Enterprise?, Sam mentioned that Jive has committed to clear standards, like XMPP, and will commit to new standards as they clarify. Given the gravity of Google and Facebook, he feels DataPortability should be one of them. The purpose of the DataPortability project is to put existing technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation of data portability. Portability is defined as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used.

I'm looking for additional social features and plugins to appear in Clearspace in the near future.     Maybe Jive can find ways to use the new Ringside Social Application Server to further the social aspects of Clearspace.