Zembly Serves Up an Olympics App, Rethinks Social App Creation

by Sam Dean - Aug. 07, 2008Comments (3)

Fantasy football is all well and good, but how about making predictions about who will win in the upcoming Beijing Olympics? Zembly, which is focused on allowing people to build online social mash-ups with their code available to others via a BSD license, has an interesting Olympics prediction application already built and posted for Facebook users. The home page for the application is here, with instructions on how to launch it (you need a Facebook account).

Zembly is focused on the notion that while social platforms such as Meebo, Facebook, and MySpace have begun opening up their platforms for outside developers to build social and situational applications, "the software development process used to create these applications has not benefited from the collaborative nature of social networks."

According to company background documents that Zembly sent over: "Zembly allows users to collaboratively build, publish, and host Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps,
Meebo apps, iPhone applications, widgets, Google gadgets, and other social applications on the Web, all from the convenience of a browser. Thus nontechnical users can compose mashups and other social and situational applications out of widgets and RESTful-style web services, all built by using lightweight technologies and composed right from the browser." Zembly makes extensive use of widgets, JavaScript, and open APIs, but appears to be easy to use.

The idea is essentially that some of the known benefits of open source application development--lots of eyeballs, community decision-making about the components of applications, and free, open licensing and availability--can benefit those building social applications. Zembly is in private beta now, but you can request to use it at the home page. Here's a snapshot of the Olympics application built in Zembly:

 

 


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3 Comments
 

Interesting. Why would I collaboratively build an app, though, especially if it is a smaller one? I mean, the hardest part of app building is the collaboration coordination. Now, if I can reuse components, and there is a good documentation, perhaps I can build on top of the work of others...

0 Votes

Yes, it is about reusing components. You can be collaborative on any particular part of your app if you want (e.g. a widget), but mainly the focus is on reusing pieces and parts that other people have added to zembly and thus building your app without taking on the entire task yourself. Zembly gets better the more people use it.

0 Votes

Are there are pre-built widgets we can get started with? Can I add to that library? What about IP issues?

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