Joyent Supports hi5 and Open Social
MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA – March 13, 2008: Expands Social Networking partnerships by providing free Accelerators optimized for the Open Social platform.
Features
An overview of the system-wide features available across the Joyent Connector suite of applications:
Tagging and Smart Groups
Tagging allows you to apply simple keywords to any piece of information. Apply tags to email messages, files, events, anything. Use tags to group related items together and to apply keywords that will later help you search for and locate individual items.
The same tags are available across the entire Joyent system, which means, for example, that after applying a tag to an email message, you can apply the same tag to events and files related to that message. Tags come in particularly handy when you create smart groups.
A smart group is a dynamically-updated collection of items. To create one, you define a few simple criteria to match the items the group will contain.
For example, let’s say you’re working on your company’s annual report. In Mail, you can create a smart mailbox containing all messages tagged with “annual report”. In Calendar, you can create a smart calendar containing all of the events tagged “annual report”.
Most powerfully, at the home page of the Joyent system, you can create a smart group for all items, from any application, which are tagged “annual report”. Smart groups can contain email messages, files, contacts, and events — grouped together in one place.
Because smart groups update dynamically, when you — or any of the other members of your team — tag more items with “annual report”, your smart groups will update automatically to contain these new items. Tagging makes it easy for your entire team to track all items related to a project, everything from email messages to events to files.
Joyent’s system-wide integration and consistency allow you to spend more time working, and less time looking around for things.
Search
Search once, find everything. With a single, simple search field, Joyent allows you to search across all of the information on your team’s Joyent account: email, contacts, calendar events, and files. In the same way that the Connect app allows you to create smart group collections of information from across the entire Joyent software suite, searching allows you to find anything you want, at any time.
RSS and iCalendar Subscriptions
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard format for receiving information as “feeds”. Each feed has a distinct URL, which an RSS aggregator checks regularly on your behalf, letting you know when new information is available, much in the same way an email application alerts you when new messages arrive. Popular desktop RSS aggregators include NetNewsWire (for Mac OS X) and FeedDemon (for Windows).
Joyent offers rich support for RSS. Each group in every app can be subscribed to as an RSS feed. So, for example, you could subscribe to an email mailbox, and the feed would be updated with each new message in that mailbox. Or, you could subscribe to a calendar, in which case that feed would contain the upcoming events in that calendar.
But where Joyent’s system-wide integration comes into play is when you subscribe to smart groups. This allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds containing disparate data times — email messages, address book contacts, files, and calendar events — based on the tags that have been assigned to those items. One RSS feed can be used to track all of the information regarding a particular project.
It’s a simple, powerful way to track information.
Comments Everywhere
Consistent across Joyent applications is the ability to leave and receive comments on just about any item: files, calendar items, even shared emails. Team input and feedback has never been easier to gather.
Flexible Privacy, Security You Can Trust
We designed the privacy and security policies for Joyent Connector around what we informally call the “cubicle” model. What we mean by this is that your digital information in your Connector account is “private” much in the same as real-world material in a small business office. The idea is to keep outsiders out, but allow your team to interchange information and files freely and with minimal friction.
So, by default, all items in Joyent Connector are visible to all other members of your team — much like items sitting on your desk or hanging on your wall are visible to colleagues in your office. However, you can easily mark any item or group of items as private, or restrict them to a specific set of other users — much like putting items into a locked desk drawer.
When it comes to keeping outsiders out, Joyent Connector provides dead serious security. All traffic to the server can be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) — in other words, using HTTPS instead of HTTP. Email traffic via IMAP and SMTP are protected by SSL, too. Even the RSS feeds generated by Joyent Connector are password-protected. None of this should be surprising — our best-of-breed security policies are brought to you by the minds behind Strongspace, the popular ultra-secure file storage service.
Lastly, the hosting servers, networking, storage, and backup systems behind Joyent Connector are provided by TextDrive, Joyent’s renowned Web hosting service. We obsess about performance, data integrity, and security so you don’t have to.