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a building block for ePortfolios

In an earlier post I asked whether Google could be my ePortfolio. While I can find out quite a bit about me and other people who share my name using a Google search, its not really an ePortfolio application (then again, what is?). As a participant in a number of social networking services, I have content about me in potentially many of them that would be useful for inclusion into some form of ePortfolio. One of the frustrations that I have is how to combine content from a number of places that I would find useful into some sort of personal portfolio platform. Many services have their own interfaces that are inconsistent with others. Each service that I want to interact with is accessed in a different manner. Now along comes OpenSocial from Google. OpenSocial specifies a common set of interfaces for accessing social networking applications. The number of services that are listed as committed to it is impressive. Services such as LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, imeem, slide, MySpace to name a few are all in there. Each of these services could provide an interesting component of my ePortfolio. Having a common set of interfaces should simplify the task of developing an aggregate platform for ePortfolios. Combining this with institutional or systemic ePortfolio implementations would be really useful.

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