Wednesday, April 30, 2008

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 <>.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

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
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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.
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Friday, October 19, 2007

I was cleaning up an old laptop recently, organizing all my applications. In my clean up I checked out some of the lists of open source applications people use and pimped myself out with the latest - Miro was a good one I just picked up for podcast, while Juice I tried and dropped. This is just my list of useful applications and way to keep the links in one place for future reference. I found good stuff in this post and the comments as well.

Standard Applications


Being creative



Listening In Keeping Up

Utility




And for that friend who asked for some utility stuff for windows which was open source




Can you match icons to the application name? (All of the images already link to correct project homes).
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Friday, October 5, 2007



It's great to be in amazement. His excitement, his wonder of the colors. Of course he ran around the rest of the afternoon pretending this was a web shooter and that he was spiderman!
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Saturday, September 1, 2007

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Just finished up the book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". It is required reading for my finance course, first few chapters anyway. Started it while on vacation and could not really put it down. I would call this book an excellent perspective, must read before you try to game the market.

However, just to add my 2 cents.
1. The market would not be a random walk if it were not for all the schemes people attempt. Each scheme forces the market to be random. I believe the systematic risk of a any given stock is based on the risk of the leadership of such company. Strong leadership, strong business. Read "Good to Great" to understand. The measurement of risk based on numbers at best (in my opinion) can only be used to predict some for of short run direction. As this information is no better than a chartist and any scheme would just serve to further "A Random Walk".

2. I did not see "Game Theory" discussed at all in the book, though I am sure there must be something out there on the topic. My guess is that unsystematic risk driven by plain old schemes, behavioral finance theory and even arbitrage are no more than forms of game theory. The real scheme would be if everyone learned from each other and played some form of tit-for-tat game theory. However with combination of independent and institution players and the global competitiveness this would not be possible.

As it relates to risk vs return, higher risk in the market only produces more returns for those in control of the risk. If others now your risk they can play against it (sounds game theory to me).

Moral of the story?
a. Long run thinking will be productive, assuming everyone else is coming up with schemes.
(corollary - There could be a situation of long run game theory which destroys you and the market)
b. Short run schemes can pay off, but its not much better than luck and gambling. Even the greatest theory could be undermined with others playing game theory against you. And hence timing of taking your money would just be luck.
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Welcome to the Widgets web

It started innocent, I came across widgetbox and said sure I can write a widget. 7 Blidgets, 2 remote SWF widgets, and 2 social shout out widgets later I was wondering more about widgets. (Obligatory link to wikipedia). So did a little digging and found the following ( this is what I found, let me know if there is more )

  • 9 Platforms for widgets
  • 3 main technologies for web widgets
  • 10 desktop widget systems
  • 12 Million in funding I can find,
  • 2 Companies internally funding platforms (Fox and Vendio)
  • Mark Cuban funded one of them (undisclosed amount)
  • Mobile widget providers are popping up (found 3 but did not look that hard)
  • W3C? is driving a standard for this
  • 2 Widget conferences

And I found one great post which lays the whole thing out.

My Take I have not written widgets yet for all the platforms, though I think the simplicity of widgetbox enables creation, distrubtion, management with just knowledge of the basics (html and/or javascript). Want to go deeper then write some flash. I am impressed with yourminis, but not so much for the widget platform, rather for the potential of a "Social Desktop".

Most of the folks in this space are concentrating (at least from my perspective) on the ad network, I am not sure if the intention is to be the ad network or be the a channel for the ad network and claim a slice of the pie. They each seem to promote the number of widgets deployed, which I guess represents the amount of web-space they have access to. Bigger your network bigger your valuation. It also seems their biggest distribution is the blogging universe and the social platforms likes facebook/myspace. Myspace has SpringWidgets? , Yahoo has widgets, Google has theirs, MS has theirs, Apple has something, and note for most of these there is not only a widget concept but a layer which enables you to integrate closer to their core platform. I would expect (probably already exists) a widget platform which has default integration with MyFace? and one which is focused on 'mashups', maybe a QED-Mashup-Widget-Maker. I figure that a good exit for these companies would be acquisition by a core social or similar platform, widgets are important to a platform (because they offer front sidemulti-sided market platform dynamics). There is definitely one platform / company which is seems to resonate across all widget makers, "Adobe, all your widgets are belong to us."

I am by far not an expert on widgets, just writing my impressions so far.

Widgets I wrote, writing, or just playing with

WidgetBoxWidgetsIWrote

List of widget based Systems

Widget Platforms

Widgets Tech

  • HTML
  • FLASH
  • JAVA

Common Desktop Widget Systems

Mobile Widget Systems

Browser Extension

Standards for Widgets

Widget Conference

Widget Business Model conversations and observations

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