Now Sun has a social network server, too

I was surprised to read today that Sun just released SocialSite, an open-source social network server similar to Ringside Networks. Per Patrick Chanezon's blog: "Socialsite is an open source (CDDL/GPL) social network server based on Apache Shindig (Java) that implements the database and User Interface for a full fledge social network. Since it is based on Shindig, it implements OpenSocial."

Sounds great, right? My question? Why does Sun have a social network server. Sun makes great technology - lots of it. Does it make too much?

I don't mean to be critical but I have a hard time wrapping my wee brain around how this fits into the larger Sun story of cloud, storage, identity management, etc. If Sun had a stated policy - as Google does - of allowing employees to tinker on projects that interest them for 20 percent of the time, I wouldn't give this a second thought. But I'm not aware of such a policy at Sun.

Thought?

[lmasanti]

I think that Sun has a "buy all your stuff from me" politics.
It always does [want to] sell you everything.
And do not forget that it is also made in Sun's Java!

[mbbickel]

The way we see the market going is that there are an emerging set of API's and infrastructure software needed to enable a website to become social. One of those API's is Open Social, and the Shindig project implements this. You could kind of view Shindig as equal to the old Sun Reference Implementations of like J2EE, and SocialSite as a production implementation. Of coruse RIngside is another production implementation of Open Social (done in PHP vs. Sun's implementation in Java) and with a broader foot print because of support for Facebook's API's and a richer set for security, payment and other applications we have included for things like Profile, friending, polls, etc.

Bob Bickel
[e-mail]

[TodoInTX]

I can sorta see how this falls in line with Identity Management. A big part of what defines my identity is who I associate with.