The new company's product will enable integration of social networking applications into any Web site.
Ringside Networks on March 25 will formally launch as a company
and also launch what it calls the first open-source social
application server that seamlessly integrates Facebook applications with any
Web site.
The company will launch at the Open Source Business Conference in
San
Francisco.
According to Bob Bickel, a co-founder of the company and former JBoss
executive, Ringside will announce a beta of the Ringside Social Application
Server, an open-source platform that enables businesses to weave social capabilities
directly into their existing Web sites while seamlessly integrating with social
networks such as Facebook.
"Companies have spent far too much time and effort building their
brands, Web sites, content and applications to hand over social networking to
some third party," Bickel said in a statement. "Ringside Networks
gives them a way to get control over this important new way of interacting with
their users and customers, while still being able to tie into the big social
networks."
Moreover,
in
a blog post on March 17, Bickel said, "We at Ringside Networks view
Open Source as a way to not only bring innovation to the market, but as a way
to enable others to unlock the power of social networking in new and innovative
applications."
The Ringside Social Application Server includes a Social Application Engine
that enables Web site developers to quickly build, customize and deploy their
own social applications as well as the included set of standard social
applications such as user profiles, friends, groups, comments, ratings,
favorites and events.
Ringside also delivers support for federated social graphs for integrating Ringside-based
social graphs with other social networks, such as Facebook. In addition, the
product features an extensible
API and tag
library to enable developers to extend Facebook's
API
and markup language, as well as define their own application-specific APIs and
tags to handle custom behavior and improve Web site integration.
A future version of the Ringside Social Application Server will support OpenSocial
compatibility and interoperability to provide the ability to
seamlessly work with other social networks such as MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and Bebo
in a standard manner.
Matt Assay, a
blogger on all things open source, on March 21 said Ringside's offering
"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 website. Suddenly,
socializing becomes smart business. In my work with Alfresco, I see demand for
this sort of application growing stronger by the day."
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