Jordy Blog

Dwight Schrute on Google Friend Connect

When I first read about Google Friend Connect, an upcoming service that will allow website owners to easily add social network functionality to their own websites, I immediately thought of these lines from NBC’s “The Office”:

Dwight: Why am I being forced to come in tomorrow and pretend that a website made sales that I made?
Ryan: This is a temporary measure to increase the legitimacy of the site.
Stanley: I don’t like when my clients call me to help them use the website, I’m not seeing commissions on that.
Ryan: I hear you Stanley, that is a great observation. Problems like that will not happen when we launch Dunder Mifflin Infinity 2 point O.
Stanley: When will that be?
Ryan: TBD. Phyllis?
Phyllis: Did the police solve the problem with the…
Ryan: Yes, yes they did, yes they did.
Ryan: Yes, the social networking feature of the Dunder Mifflin Infinity website was infiltrated by sexual predators.
Dwight: I don’t understand why our website has to have social networking at all.
Jim: Yeah, I actually have to agree with Dwight on that one.
Ryan: It’s all about creating a one stop shop consumer experience, alright? You’re chatting with your friends, you’re talking about the latest music, about the election; all of it is happening in our virtual paper store.
Jim: And then an older gentleman asked you “Boxers or briefs?”
Creed: I don’t get the big fuss here, I like the site.
Kelly: If I’d have created a website with as many problems, I’d kill myself.
Ryan: Do you have a question Kelly?
Kelly: Yeah I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you?
Michael: [slow clapping] Ryan has done a very good job, and I am not applauding sarcastically. Think about it, a month ago nobody would go on this site because we were worried about getting molested, or losing our identity, having it stolen. But now, at a time TBD, all of the problems will be in the past. Ya done good kid, ya done good.
– Source: OfficeQuotes.net

I thought all this was pretty funny, but the ability to drop social features onto your website with little more than some pasting of JavaScript might just prove us all wrong.  :)

Example:

3 of your friends liked SemiGloss Oxford White Cardstock #80.  Click here to get new friends!

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Online Word Processing with Writely

If you haven’t seen Writely (the beta online word processor) yet, you really should check it out. I think the “online platform” thing is going to be huge, and (although I love Excel) I hope Writely rocks proprietary Microsoft to its core. Writely looks sharp and is sure to grow with the funding and reputation of Google behind it.

Some things I like:

• Writely imports and exports to Open Office’s newly ISO approved OpenDocument files
• Writely automatically backs up your files every 8 seconds
• Writely supports multiple editors at once (a purpose for which I used wiki all through college).
• Writely versions your editions so you can easily revert to previous state.

One thing I don’t like:

• “WWW2″ right in the URL… It’s just too much.

I’m sure I’ll find other things I dislike as I try it out. Writely is free, but it won’t accept new users until June or July. I signed up for the mailing list to get an early crack at it.