7. A system for dynamically populating a portlet palette comprising: a processor; a non-volatile memory; a volatile memory; and a bus communicatively linking said processor, said non-volatile memory, and said volatile memory, wherein said processor is operable to execute programmatic instructions contained in the volatile memory, wherein said non-volatile memory is a computer usable medium that stores computer usable program code executable by said plurality of processing cores, said computer usable program code being configured to: associate semantic tags with each of a plurality of stored portlets and with at least one of an open portal or open portlets contained within the open portal, wherein each semantic tag provides semantic information for the portlet or portal for which it is associated, and wherein each semantic tag comprises user entered data; detect an event to initialize a portlet palette within a user interface having the open portal to which the portlet palette is associated, wherein the portlet palette is a user interface control comprising a portlet set of at least one portlet, wherein said portlet palette is configured so that a selection of a portlet from the portlet set causes the portlet to be added to the open portal; compare via the semantic information contained within the semantic tags of the stored portlets against the semantic information contained within the semantic tags of at least one of the open portal and the open portlets; automatically determine a set of portlets from a plurality of stored portlets that are relevant to the open portal based upon results of comparing the semantic information; dynamically populate the portlet palette with the determined set of portlets; and present the populated portlet palette within the user interface.
9. The system of claim 7 , said computer usable program code being further configured to: store records to relate user identity to a user specific configuration for a portal, where the user specific configuration comprises a configuration set of portlets; determine an identity of a current user of the open portal; ascertain at least one other user having a relationship strength with the current user over a previously configured threshold, wherein the relationship strength is based upon a social networking relationship existing between the current user and the other user, wherein said social networking relationship is determined from interactions between the current user and the other user occurring through at least one social networking site, said social networking data being stored in a repository of social networking data accessible by a server responsible for dynamically populating said palette utilizing a social networking interface of the server; query the stored records of the at least one other user to determine the configuration set of portlets of the other user; and determine said set of portlets from a plurality of stored portlets that are relevant to the open portal based upon results of comparing the semantic information and based upon portlets of the determined configuration set associated with the other user, wherein the determined set of portlets used to dynamically populate the portlet palette comprise at least one portlet from the results of comparing the semantic information of the semantic tags and comprise at least one portlet from the configuration set of portlets of the other user, wherein the set of relevant portlets comprises the portlets of the determined configuration set associated with each of the at least one other user.