The ever-inventive openSUSE gang have come up with another cool service to enhance user experience and promote good will. This time it is a little less technical and a little more social. Connect with other openSUSE users, developers, and groups. You can make friends, find out the latest news, and get involved.

Henne Vogelsang introduced the new service a few days ago and he said connect was the answer to "What are we really doing when we develop a new tool to handle openSUSE users and groups?" The purpose is to connect people to projects, groups and with each other; connect faces to names, nicknames and to email addresses; and, ultimately, connect all our other tools to this one so we can share the data, as Vogelsang explained. In other words, it's openSUSE's very own little social network.

connect "introduces the nowadays mandatory social features. Instead of rather boring collection of user attributes, connect reflects the social relations among the openSUSE community. It allows the users to share activities, places, events and interests within their network. It truly helps you to connect with other lizards."

Now it's unlikely to overtake Facebook or replace Twitter, but it does have some nice extra benefits. One of these benefits is a universal identification mechanism. With that members would no longer need to sign up with each of the separate openSUSE services and maintain those accounts individually. They could just use their connect account.

Join project groups and keep up with discussions on future ideas, current development, or perhaps even semi-secret gossip. Find out what friends are doing on openFATE or the Build Service. With membership you can even vote in project polls and elections.

So far, there are 24 groups created. These include Geekos, the KDE and GNOME teams, LibreOffice team, Russian, French, and Greek openSUSE teams, and an openSUSE Testers team (who tests pre-releases for bugs). You know you want to join the Testers team!

Go join up and mingle today.