Google's Salmon Makes First Splash With Cliqset Integration

Cliqset has become one of the first social media sites to integrate the protocol Salmon, an open-source project led in part by Google engineers. The protocol works behind the scenes, allowing people on multiple social networks or blogs to have conversation threads even when sites are not connected through APIs on the backend.

StatusNet, a microblogging company whose engineers are active on the Salmon protocol, will test the protocol with Cliqset. The companies launched the first phase -- Salmon Mentions -- earlier this week. The Cliqset feature remains limited, but there are big plans for the future.

Salmon Mentions today allows people to tag a person in a photo and send it to a friend, similar to the way someone might tag a friend in a photo on Facebook. In the future, people will have an option to have a conversation with multiple people who can reply to one another with an @ symbol and screen name. It works similar to a Twitter reply tag.

When Google implements Salmon on Buzz, which some believe could come before the I/O developer conference in May, someone on Gmail Buzz will have an option to form a conversation thread with another on Cliqset simply by including the @ symbol and tag name. But Salmon will not limit the conversation to two people. Many more can join in.

"We will add @ replies within the next six weeks," says Cliqset Founder Darren Bounds. "Once we do that, it's really a matter of others doing it, too, before it takes off."

Asking Bounds to describe benefits for marketers, he points to an aggregated view of conversations across social sites and blogs such as Blogger and WordPress. If a marketer starts a conversation on a Salmon-enabled blog, the thread will flow back to the marketer to provide a holistic view of the conversation about a company, no matter where the conversation takes place.

"Marketers can talk back to the audience from the blog," he says. "They won't have to go to the sites like Twitter to talk with them. They can do it directly from the blog by using what looks like an email address, only with an @ sign on front."

The Salmon protocol creates duplicate posts across the Internet. The same conversation stream will live both on Cliqset and StatusNet. But while the protocol creates a duplicate conversation string, search engine spiders like Google will only recognize and index the original post to each conversation. John Panzer, Google engineer, spearheaded the open-source Salmon protocol project.

The specifications of the activity stream in the post carry a reference number -- a unique identification -- to the originating source or post. "As the conversation flows from place to place to place, an identifier or URL points back to where it's created," Bounds explains.

Bounds says Cliqset, which launched last year, has been growing about 50% each month for the past five. The site now has about 70,000 users, up from 5,000 in September. With Salmon supporting the back end, Bounds expects to see hockey stick growth in the coming year. Bounds also is a contributing author of OAuth 1.0a, which allows Web sites like Twitter and Google to have access to information in another application.

 

Statusnet-Salmon

 

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