What is the best web design for a social networking platform? We’re certainly thinking about this as we plan on the release of UCSF Profiles, our research (as opposed to ‘social’) networking site.  Smashing Magazine has a useful article that summarizes key principles.  One of these is about standards – they encourage the usage of OpenSocial as a standard in building social networking sites.  And – we’re glad to say, we’re on it.  We’re in the process of extending our research networking product, ‘Profiles’, as an OpenSocial “container”. i.e. retrofitting the software so that it’s possible to use other OpenSocial applications, built, for example, for applications like Linked In, to plug and play with our product.  This will be a primary contribution of UCSF’s in the continued open source development of the Harvard-developed ‘Profiles’.