Facebook and Ringside Tags

Tags provide a consistent user experience in a platform, for facebook it ensures all applications that 'hook' into the system can (if they choose to) have a consistent look and feel. Jeff and I continually discuss that the Ringside Platform does not have as many tags as the faceobook platform, as of yet, however we have two major differences

• New Tags
• Adaptation
  

We can add new tags to the platform that we ship or developers can add their own tags and make it available to applications deployed to their network. For example if you wanted every application to have the ability to use gifts you can add a tag . Now every application can have a gift component which is across the ENTIRE system. The gift would be scoped to the application, really no different than how fb:comment works today in Facebook but for anything you can think of!

In Facebook applications are adapted for the Facebook platform allowing all apps to have a similar user experience. In Ringside this is true as well, all applications can come together with a common user experience, but that experience can begin to change when the same application is rendered through to a third party community, network or site. This adaptation is being expanded for our June release but will allow the same application to maintain its portability of data and functions yet allow customization based on where it is being rendered.

Jason, Bill and I (and team) have been going back and forth on the how the adaptation would work. How much to put at the application scope, ie the application decides what to pick up from the third party network or how much the third party network controls how the application looks. I just started the thread in the forums (http://forums.ringsidenetworks.org/thread.jspa?threadID=16) as we were discussing this in IRC (#ringside).

Today we have about 50 tags implemented and more coming. Many of the standard Facebook tags and some example tags such as <>.

Ringside APIs

While we have been putting effort into supporting Facebook APIs

• Admin - 2 of 4
• Application - 1 of 1
• Auth - 2 of 2
• Batch - not yet supported
• Data - currently support UserPreferences
• Events - 2 of 2
• FBML - 3 of 3
• Feed - 2 of 3
• FQL - Supported but not yet for all tables ( but coming )
• Friends - 3 0f 4
• Groups - 2 of 2
• MarketPlace - not yet implemented, but let us know if you need them
• Notifications - 3 of 4
• Pages - 4 of 4
• Photos - 5 of 6
• Profile - 2 of 2
• Users - 5 of 5

We have also been adding our own about 50+ of them!

• Admin - 14 apis supporting administrative functions
• Auth - Things you just can't do with Facebook
• Comments - 4 simple Apis for get, set, count and removing
  
• Favorites - Built into the system
• Friends - 4 apis including basic search
• Items - I guess in the way of marketplace but generic to built on top of
• Ratings - Ratings APIs so it can be used globally
• Subscriptions - 3 for Payment stuff, expect a lot more of these soon
• Suggestion - Use them as freely as you would comments in a facebook application
• Users - 8 api's for administrative apps

We are in process of automating the documentation for ALL the api's, they will be available at Ringside Community.

Have ideas for more things which should be part of the core platform? Have an API you want baked in or at least visibile to others? Get involved in our development community and we can

Ringside Beta 2 Release

Beta 2 Released

We released Beta 2 tonight and we are on pace to have releases every 2 weeks here on out. To facilitate this we have a completely automated build and test process much thanks to the open source projects listed for making this possible.

* Hudson ( https://hudson.dev.java.net/ )
* PHP Unit ( http://phpunit.de/ )
* SimpleTest ( http://simpletest.org/ )

We have also started to add tests against our demo/tutorial applications with simpletest to ensure each beta supports the tutorials as well.
Beta 2 Includes

* Working Identity Mapping, though we are adding more in usability and demonstrations in the next Beta.
* Starting example of Payment APIs, Tags and administration (Brian is posting a screen show of this as well)
* Developer Network UI - Enables adding support for an app to connect to multiple networks
* Network Management - Ability to add third party networks (supporting lots of social communities to start using your application)

Release Notes Beta 2
Some insights into Beta 3.

* Identity Mapping
* Early beta of Open Social integration
* Open ID Integration for IDM
* More payment APIs and TAGs
* More example applications.