Taglined "The Geekiest Social Network", My developerWorks just keeps getting better. As I mentioned, the IBM developerWorks crew have really taken the social network via Lotus Connections to the community, resulting in an influx of new IBM Online Community (not everyone sticks to Lotus - sad to report ;-) ) Bloggers making the scene and really contributing some great content.

Aside from content generation, there's also the added bonus of grabbing your own Subject Matter Expert Connections Profile - which can work 24-7 for your business networking and collaborative efforts... provided your honest in your tagging and bio information of course!

If you haven't signed up yet, check out the following demo video showing off My developerWorks. And for those of you not particularly interested in social networking -- y'know... those of you with resession-proof jobs that know everything you'll ever need to know right now and are too busy telling the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn -- consider this yet another public example of a solid Lotus Connections playground!

And for those of you already in the Lotus Online Community who have an established blog, I'm actually working with the crew at developerWorks on that. More details on that as they materialize - which will hopefully be soon!

After rather unsuccessfully trying to get the LotusLive Connections Activities to load in my Lotus Notes 8.5 Client sidebar, I thought that tonight I'd give the support forums a quick look. I was shocked (but I should have known) that there were step-by-step instructions for doing this very thing!

In the following LotusLive Connections Forum thread (LotusLive Authentication Required), Margaret O'Connell writes:

How to configure the Notes 8.5 Activities sidebar for LotusLive:

1. Install Notes 8.5 with the Activities integration included.
2. Go to the Activities sidebar and click on the "Show connection options" link
3. This brings you to the Activities preference panel in Notes. Enter URL https://apps.lotuslive.com and your user password at the top and click Apply.
4. This will cause an authentication dialog to be presented. Cancel out of that. Twice. (This is an attempt to authenticate using Java Form).
5. Now go to Notes preferences, but this time the Accounts preference panel. Select the Activities account you see there and click the Edit Account button.
6. Leave everything "as is" up top but click on Advanced properties near the bottom. Change the Authentication Type to HTTP Basic and clear out the Authentication URL.
7. Restart Notes 8.5.
8. When you come back in, your Activities sidebar should be populated with your activities.

Simple enough really...

From here: File\Preferences...

Make it look like this:

And no, my password is not ********!

I think the thing that makes our community (that is, the Lotus Online Community at large) so successful is the fact that we readily adopt new technologies that allow us to connect to and collaborate with people that can make our day-to-day that much easier. This community is filled with subject matter experts, ranging from those who know absolutely everything about a particular niche feature in a given Lotus product family to expertise that resides outside of the Lotus product family. A simple tweet to asking for suggestions for a XHTML, XML, CSS, etc. editor for Windows - yielded many awesome suggestions and a confirmation that Aptana was the product to go with!

So I was interested (to say the least) when I heard the news from Lotusphere 2009 about LotusLive.com, and decided to check it out. I was surprised to find that it's more than yet-another-social network for the online community! Formerly Bluehouse, LotusLive showcases some of the latest Lotus tech in the Business 2.0 product space, giving us hands-on demos of the integrated Communities, Forums, File Sharing, online Meetings (powered - from what I can tell - by Sametime Unyte/Webdialogs), as well as Instant Messaging via Sametime. Now, being both a BleedYellow and Greenhouse user, I'm used to public community-based Sametime - but using this in combination with the Unyte features makes this a killer community solution. But I might be getting ahead of myself here...

The Good

• Lotus Connections + Sametime Unyte
• Hands-on playground, where I can not only learn just-how-useful this particular Lotus technology can be, but something that I can showcase to my customers.
• If you've signed up for Bluehouse, your login credentials have been ported!
• Registration, and usage, is free!

The Bad

• Works great in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Google Chrome (which I use as my day-to-day browser) and by extension Safari... not so much.
• The Activities Sidebar widget doesn't appear to work with LotusLive.com. Perhaps it's a versioning issue...
• I have near 400 people that I'm connected to on Facebook, 250+ following me on Twitter, and with BleedYellow and Greenhouse... adding new users to my contact list for another social network is becoming tiring.

So, how can we make it easy to get connected? Well, here's a quick tip! Post a URL to your LotusLive Profile!

From My Dashboard, simply click on your name under the My Account. This will bring to you your publically-accessible LotusLive.com Profile. From there, you can either tweet, blog, or otherwise communicate that profile by it's URL. For example, my LotusLive.com Public Profile can be found at https://apps.lotuslive.com/contacts/profiles/view/11739.

Once you've opened, someone's profile - provided you've authenticated to LotusLive.com yourself - simply select the Get Connected option on their profile, and you're all set!

And you Sametime Client users can quickly add the LotusLive.com Sametime Server to your Server Communities list: im.lotuslive.com.

So if you haven't checked out LotusLive, or haven't been back since it was Bluehouse - give it a spin. I have a feeling (</wink>) that this is just the beginning of many cool and useful community initiatives coming from IBM/Lotus, so get in there now and start playing!