Social Networking for Every Web Site

Next week Ringside Networks will release a Social Application Server in free and open source that will allow any web site to take advantage of social networking.

I read this blog from Mark Brooks that says we may be on the right track.

“Consumers are sick and tired of being advertised at. Traditional advertising is dead. If you can't afford the time to have ambassadors and evangelists for your brand converse with your users directly through social networks, your brand will die.”

Ringside Networks is going to enable any web site to enhance their communications with their user base by creating and deploying social applications, and expand it beyond by allowing web sites to integrate with the large social networks like Facebook.

More coming on Tuesday, March 25th!

Comments

Howard Keziah said…
I think I understand what Ringside is doing and I like it. However, I don't understand how Ringside Networks intends to make money. That makes me hesitant to invest time using the product. I don't want to invest time and energy to later discover hidden costs that I'll incur for use.
April 22, 2008 at 10:17 AM
Bob said…
Good question. We intend to keep the platform totally open source with an LGPL license. We expect to add-on functionality and sell that in a subscription model. One of hte areas we will probably focus on is a set of analytical tools and applications that will help marketers understand and take action on the social graph. You could of course do this yourself because you own the data - so nothing that would prevent the open source intentions of this product. We did a similar startegy at JBoss, where the middleware was always open soruce, and we sold the management tools at a cost.

The other thing we will probably put into the production version we release at the end of June is a Payment Service. We will charge money for that - either as a fixed fee or a %. We should be able to do some interesting things with the social graph - like you could buy a subscription to some social application and pick say 10 of your firends that would also share that subscription. For example, a Family could share access to a game. Or a department in a company could share access to some social application that helped them collaborate.
April 22, 2008 at 10:28 AM
Howard Keziah said…
Thanks for the clarification.

Regarding the payment system, are you saying that you might be providing a payment system on our behalf? That you would collect a fee or % of what we charge? If so, that would be just a great benefit.
April 22, 2008 at 2:24 PM
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