Ringside to offer first open-source 'social-application server'

(Credit: Ringside Networks)

I guess it was just a matter of time before Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman, and other former JBoss employees started another application server company. Who knew, however, that they'd launch the world's first open-source "social-application server"?

What the heck is that? Well, for one thing, Ringside Networks is certainly an innovative use of open source. For those who think that open source can't compete and innovate new markets, Ringside is about to put that theory to the test.

According to a data sheet the company provided me, to be distributed at Ringside's formal launch at next week's Open Source Business Conference, this is what the product does and is:

Ringside Social Application Server is the first open-source platform that enables Web site owners to build and deploy social applications that operate with existing Web site content and business applications while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook.

This provides three primary advantages:

• Web site look and feel is exactly what a company uses today.
• Social applications can be designed and customized to be more meaningful to a given Web site's users and business--rather than be limited to standard default capabilities.
• Existing corporate Web site content and business applications can be made socially aware.

(Credit: Ringside Networks)

This sounds incredibly cool. It means that existing corporate Web sites can be made socially aware. I'm not sure this is even possible with Ning, but certainly not to the extent that an open-source platform like Ringside offers.

It has a range of cool features like the ability to gather "social intelligence. In other words, the Ringside platform allows business owners to gain insight into the social graph of users, relationships, groups, interactions, and sharing that is occurring on their Web site. Suddenly, socializing becomes smart business.

In my work with Alfresco, I see demand for this sort of application growing stronger by the day. Kudos to Ringside for recognizing the market opportunity and to David Skok at Matrix Partners for funding it. This is one of the most interesting open-source opportunities in the market today.

[royrusso]

If this keeps up, OSBC will just be one big ex-JBossian reunion.

[russ danner]

Just got to San Francisco (OSBC Conference) and finding out what this is all about is pretty high on my priority list :)

I wonder what overlap it has with initiatives like openSocial. I'm sure it will play nice with open social, from what little information is available at the moment it actually looks like it could help with the fact that facebook isn't part of openSocial.

One thing I find really interesting is that Google is willing to host social applications "for free" so that developers don't have to worry about building the infrastructure to host popular applications. I haven't looked in it much, I wonder what kind of restrictions they have. For example can my application call out from their hosting facility to other services (perhaps facebook services?)

Anyway -- I'm pretty interested in finding out where this is headed.

[vervelabs]

Hi Russ,

I posted the comments on Social Agency. We are working on the Facebook / OpenSocial interoperability pain point. As we pursue our product development, we really want to discover the needs of our potential customers. We want to build a product that you will value and want to understand the product features that are important to you. We don't want to take the "build it and they will come approach" ? instead we want to address your pain points in a mutually beneficial way.

I would love to discuss our ideas in more detail, provide you with some of our experiences, and get a better understanding of how to aid you in your business. Please feel free to contact me via email at [e-mail].

[vervelabs]

This is a very hot area of Web 2.0 development. We are a startup that is tackling the same pain point as Ringside. We, Social Agency Inc. (http://www.socialagency.com), are an Austin-based startup. Our product is a PaaS platform and user-driven social application ecosystem that enables users to create, customize, monetize, monitor and distribute applications across social networks. The core technology is the middleware layer that allows social networking applications to seamlessly interoperate across social networking platforms. Our platform is in development. We plan to have a prototype in the summer of 2008.