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 discussion 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.

Since this Blog really has taken shape yet, I guess I get the benefit of setting a possible tone moving forward.  In that regard, I hope this tone is appropriate, but from a platform perspective, I see nothing but possibilities for the Clearspace(X) platform in growing collaboration across disparate teams.

In my company, we are currently working to try and create less obscure lines between community initiatives and revenue.  Obviously the immediate first phase for attempts such as this are to try and merge into existing systems, while over time, if the technology is pervasive enough, it can ultimately change the systems to a new paradigm.  Given that we've only recently gone live with CleraspaceX 1.9.0 on OAS10g 10.1.3.3.0, we are unfortunately in the former stages of this process.

As such, some ideas that we had to leverage some of ClearspaceX's unique features include the following:

• Leveraging the Listener Framework and Filters to process content at create/edit time against a custom dictionary of terms and matching URL structures...and storing meta-data on the document/thread/blog post for rendering actions to take into consideration when rendering the item for display.  The hopes would be to do one of the following: provide a list of relevant links off to the side of the document that would help drive traffic towards measureable calls to action.  If we were bold enough, we could apply these meta-data instructions as a filter, and alter the appearance of the actual words in the content as hyperlinks.  This might be too intrusive to our customers, and we'll need to evaluate the nice balance between content ownership and ROI. =)

• Abstracting the Ratings Engine in ClearspaceX as a Ratings Service for all content on the website.  We've been looking at the possibility, of creating a private community visible only to Admins and WebService logins, and then creating Document Stubs into that community and capturing Ratings regarding non-ClearspaceX pages on those assets, and then surfacing the ratings to the remote sites as well through the same Web Service APIs.  Since ClearspaceX is integrated into our SSO solution, we already know that we are talking apples to apples between the 2 systems.  We just need to work out logistics of whether or not a user (who is logged in), has a "username" or as we call it "alias" when they rate...and how to handle the corner-cases that stem from that core issue.

Some others ideas that I do not have time to rant on include dynamic forum threads injected via Web Service integration, integration with internal document creation workflows into ClearspaceX, as well as leveraging Web Services to creating micro-communities for bolstering real-time sales opportunities between sales and customer seeking assistance. 

Currently, a pet project of mine is to get OpenFire setup and see what ideas come from that....

I hope this content has spurred some thoughts about how I envisioned ClearspaceX being used (at least from my perspective), but please comment and let us know what interests you.