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 <>.