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 ...

All of the social networks have three intersecting concepts of Friends, Groups and Activities (sometimes called events). We have been thinking about this a lot as they apply to the broader Social Web and how what we do in our normal social interactions gets reflected on the web. In our real lives, we have lots of “friends” and are involved with many groups where those friends are intermingled. For example, I have my family, my personal friends, the folks who work at Ringside, the various companies I work with, the various people I meet on behalf of Ringside, my running friends, the high school runners that I help coach, the people I meet at the running store, etc. What makes those groups meaningful are the activities that we have together. The family vacations, the dinner with friends this weekend, the planning of the next release of software, the kick-off run and party for the new runners on the team, etc. Many websites offer activities – buy a pair of shoes, book a hotel room, bu...

Joe Halin, the manager for the Moorestown Running Company, went out to see the Olympic Trials. You can see some of his photos on our store website. He has pictures with Ryan Hall, Alan Webb, Gabe Jennings, Nick Symmonds, and Anthony Famiglietti. Very cool...

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, ...