Comments on: Ringside to offer first open-source 'social-application server'

Start-up is shaking up the social-networking market well before it has hit commodity status, challenging the notion that open source can't innovate.

[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.