Bickel Blog

Shaun Connolly joined the Ringside team a couple of months ago, and has had a huge, positive impact on what we are doing and where we are going. He has come up with another blog that describes the "Beefy Middle". No, this is not referring to the 20 pounds Shaun has lost since leaving Red Hat this winter and taking up an exercise program. It refers to the area of the market above the long tail and below the skinny head. Shaun explains it all in his latest blog .

This is not one of my usual social networking blogs, but I thought it was semi-related. Clearly the "Cloud" is one of the biggest changes happening on the web today. However, one of the concerns is how to track down if my application is down or the cloud service is down? Hyperic has just released CloudStatus BETA . This is the first tool that I know if that actually checks the availability and performance statistics of cloud services. In this first Beta, they do the 5 core Amazon cloud services: EC2 (Compute), S3 (Storage), Simple Query Service, Simple DB, and Flexible Payment Service. You can drill down one ach of these to see thruput of I/O in Europe and the US for example. Think of the next step - providing a common management platform to monitor my own apps as well as the cloud - all correlated together to make sure Web 2.0 operations teams have the best visibility to manage and monitor their critical services (like Social Web;). Note: I am on the board at Hyperic, ...

Jason Kinner, our CTO, is leading our analysis of fbOpen, the recent open source project Facebook released to help the Facebook developer community. He has published a blog that describes the implementation in terms of number of API’s implemented. Our goal at Ringside is to enable the Social Web. To that end we want to make it easy to develop socially aware applications that can run on any website as well as the big social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, etc. We let any website have their own social graph and also tie into the big social network graphs as well. To make this possible, we want to make sure we implement the Facebook API in cooperation with the fbOpen project. Like I wrote in an earlier blog about Shindig and Open Social, fbOpen feels a lot like the early reference implementations of the J2EE specification that Sun put out. Something that obviously was not meant for production purposes, but could serve the community to assure compatibility and interoperabil...

While Open Social is still getting started (there are less than 300 open social applications on Orkut for example and nearly 30,000 on Facebook), it is going to be an important platform in the coming Social Web. Ringside has been working on letting any website be a container for Open Social and to hook into the emerging Open Social ecosystem. Bill Reichert does an excellent job of explaining it in this video . Open Social reminds me of the old J2EE specification. Sun released a reference implementation – similar to Open Social’s Apache Shindig reference implementation. Like the Sun version, Shindig is meant to be used as a framework for large social networks like Orkut and Hi5 to implement their own version of Open Social – just like IBM, BEA, JBoss and many others did with the Sun reference implementation. Ringside is filling in the role of implementing a production version of Shindig that any website could use to build their own little mini social network among their own users. ...

I just got a call from Ami Vora of Facebook, who has corrected me on following the advice of this other article - http://ostatic.com/163756-blog/cpalss-whats-thatss#rss . Apparently the CPAL only applies to open sourcing the files that are changed. So if a class is extended, or the database access logic is put into an API call, then that gets open sourced under the CPAL as well. Facebook’s use of the CPAL open source license is a step in the right direction. We love the fact that the community is required to donate changes back to the open source project. This is the reason we use the LGPL at Ringside. The downside of the CPAL is the requirement to give attribution. This means a little Facebook badge comes up on all websites that use the Facebook software. This makes sense from a Facebook perspective because it helps them to build their brand in return for donating their software. On the other hand, if every open source project required this, then there would be nothing on web p...