Welcome to Thursawday #9 where I’m excited about the announcement of the Google Open Social API (page will be active this evening at some point). With this I’m hoping to be able to integrate on some level into Thursawday.com and build out some open sawcial features here.

I’ve been going back and forth on OpenID because I’m hoping there will be something good built into Wordpress instead of the plugin hacks I’ve seen, that way Sawizens could sign up with their OpenID. What’s the whole Open Social API about? It’s Google’s answer to the closed Facebook application platform. With Open Social developers and webmasters will be able to build features into our sites that are presumably more open to users. I haven’t seen the API yet and thought about how it could be integrated here fully, so there will be more on the real world application here in coming weeks.

Why staying open is so important
One of the important things I’m keeping in mind with Thursawday is to try and make it more about you than this site. To do that, your project doesn’t have to have anything to do with this site, other than your commitment to return here and provide status updates on your progress (hopefully weekly). There will be more examples of this as time goes on and a few more people start sharing their Thursawday projects with the world. I anticipate very few projects besides mine will have much, if anything, to do with Thursawday.com.

And before anybody asks why the comments aren’t open. They are open to registered and logged in sawizens, not anybody who just stops in and wants to leave a random comment or spam. Those who have ran a blog for any amount of time will tell you that having registered comments only is a guaranteed way to reduce the number of comments you receive because people will not want to register just to leave a comment. I understand and respect that, because that’s my opinion with blogs, but the Sawblog registration isn’t only for the blog, it’s for everything that will happen at this site between now and 2020.

At least that’s the plan.

Through nine weeks it might seem like the site is mostly about pep talks from me and some incremental changes each week. It takes time to build a site into something worth visiting and the reason this site launched not completely ready is for transparency of the process.

I figure it will take a year or more with one day per week to be able to make the site into something that is more launch-worthy and the message about what this site is for and what it can do for you to become completely clear. I’m trying to be a living, breathing example of a Thursawday project — this website. And if it was all here at the beginning this project would already be done.

There should be nothing stopping you now, however, from getting registered and thinking through what your first Thursawday project will be.

If you’d like complete how-to instructions to get started, last week’s post: How to share your Thursawday project with the world should be helpful.

Back to updating the Wordpress software and Twitter and waiting for the Open Social API to become available.