SocialStream - Was it the GoogleWave first trial?

(2007, via Mashable) Google isn’t completely blind to the social networking trend: they’ve sponsored an ambitious social networking project that aimed to interconnect existing networks. Last year, Google sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, says Google Operating System, which calls itself a unified social network (USN).

SocialStream, as the project is called, would let you post content to and from social networks. There’s a demo video below, and the project aims to be user-centric, rather than network centric. It assumes that all services have APIs, however, which isn’t yet the case with the leader, MySpace. From the site:

Socialstream allows users to post content to any participating network. Because of this, it can inherit the ability to handle any type of content: photos, blogs, video, audio, events, and many forms of structured data. By consolidating the controls for publishing in one place, users are free to consider the content of their posts, and only as an afterthought specify the people who should see it and the sites that host it. By consolidating content in one place, Socialstream increases the benefit of commentary and referring posts, and lowers the barriers to participation.

“Google-sponsored” doesn’t necessarily mean “Google will launch this”, but it’s nonetheless interesting that such a project exists, and from the shots and description, it could be very impressive.

via: http://mashable.com