New Social Networking Site Quomodo.com Leverages Third-party Widgets

April 2, 2007; 07:57 AM
Quomodo is a joint venture between a global communication group and Satimage-software, a Mac automation software company.

Quomodo makes a new kind of web site, combining the communication within small groups (communities, families) and third-party widgets: something that was never attempted before. A page on Quomodo is really a space collectively owned and democratically shared by the members of a group which already exists in the real life, where they can use a set of - mostly collective - widgets that Quomodo makes available to all. New breeds of widgets (called "smartnotes") leverage on the intra-group communication to provide original features not yet seen on the Internet, such as tools to organize collective decisions, or widgets to install a more enjoyable, gratifying, or amusing communication channel than what the chat or the e-mail allow.

Quomodo's smartnotes development environment enables sharing data and files, and two-way communication, with the adapted privacy handling. The environment is reasonably light and simple: a Unicode text editor and a web browser are enough to develop a widget. Quomodo hosts the widgets on its own servers

Quomodo's business model is based on selling to consumers services which would be developed by third-party authors to run on Quomodo's platform. Quomodo pays to a service's author a 50-percent royalty on the service's sales.

Programming a smartnote involves client-side Javascript (which uses AJAX behind the scene) and HTML and CSS programming.

Quomodo will later add a 2nd generation of services provided by server-side programs. Quomodo's platform is based on MacOS X Server, and various bridges will enable a programmer to make easily a standard Mac or UNIX program into a web-app available to all Quomodo users.
 

Quomodo was born in September 2006 from a venture by a global communication group with Satimage-software, a Mac automation software company. Quomodo organizes, thanks to the web, the availability of services created by experts, this in the best conditions of access and with a high quality/price ratio.