Bickel Blog

Ringside is bringing the power of the Social Web to any website in two very simple, yet powerful services. Yesterday, we released a demonstration of the idea that any website could easily integrate the idea of Social Activities . Today, we are releasing a demo of our new Ringside Site Connect , which is meant to allow any website with a set of users to allow those users to become social. Many websites have large and dedicated user bases. Ringside Site Connect provides a simple way for those users to connect with each other within the website, as well as reach out and map users in the large Social Networks like Facebook and MySpace. In this demonstration , we have shown how the Food Network website could be extended to allow their users to connect thru a social application for people with similar tastes in recipes. In this application, the Food Network: - Enables users to login - Chooses which applications are available (they can use any Open Social or Facebook application, or develop

The goal of Ringside is to bring social capabilities to the entire web. Today, we are introducing an early demonstration of our Go Ringside Service that lets any website very simply add a social aspect to any activity. As we talked about earlier , people are social in small groups around specific activities – going to dinner, traveling on a business trip together, asking friends for advice on buying something, talking about a video on YouTube, etc. There are millions of websites that offer a set of services to individual users for all of these things. As opposed to the large Social Networks, our Go Ringside Service let’s any of these websites simply add a JavaScript tag to their website and suddenly become social. What does that mean? Well, you can see an example of adding social capabilities to the TicketMaster website. The demonstration shows a user buying a ticket and wanting to also invite some friends to go to the concert. The Go Ringside Service offers the user a way to no

As we pursue our goal of moving the Social Web forward, Ringside is focusing on two things. First to enable websites with user communities to become socially enabled. Second, to enable applications to become socially enabled. As we had previewed a month or so ago, one of the applications we are trying to socially enable is Payment. One of our great developers, Brian Robinson, has done a video showing the current progress of this project - http://wiki.ringsidenetworks.org/display/ringside/Payment+Services . We are now to the point where we are looking for early customers to collaborate with on deploying this technology and integrating it into their existing infrastructure. There are three interesting elements that I will highlight: 1. The payment service is designed to work across websites and social networks. In this example, premium sports content is available to users on the SportsNet website as well as Facebook and MySpace. 2. The social payment service provides companies a variety