This is the start of a couple of short posts that I’ve been itching to write about specific topics that interested me from FOWA London. Not suprisingly, there are a number of FOWA summaries and insights already circulating the blogosphere, including an account of two days camped out on the myspace bus with crates of sponsored beer!
If you didn’t make it this year, then head over to the Carsonified video archive and catch up. I can highly recommend the following:
- Blaine Cook & Joe Stump – Languages Don’t Scale
- Simon Wardley – Innovation, the future and why nothing is ever simple
- Tim Bray – The Fear Factor (Highlights)
- Jason Calcanis and Tom Nixon – Work/Life balance or Blood Sweat and Tears. (Highlights) / (Full)
Ok, I’m surfing off topic – back to Zemley. I sat in a “FOWA university” session on Friday morning, lead by Todd Fast, Founder and CTO of Zembly and Sun Microsystems veteran. In a nutshell, Zembly is a web-based social rapid application development, hosting and deployment platform, and itself a social network! Yes, that’s right – developers create personal and application profiles within a social network to rapidly and collaboratively build social apps in the cloud for release into the wild on facebook (other deployment options include Google Gadgets, OpenSocial and the iPhone). Todd also describes it as “Wikipedia for the social web”. Genius!
There are already a number of familiar web services accessible within the Zembly environment, including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon Web Services; the list goes on… It is also encouraged for developers to BYO (bring your own!) web service, and to make these services available to the wider Zembly community. Services can even be developed and shared directly within the Zembly web-based IDE.
I can really see this taking off. Not only is there the opportunity to scale a large commercial social application on Sun’s infrastructure; I also imagine a number of developers will create lightweight social apps, just for fun, only to find themselves with a small team of collaborators and an app rampaging through the social net.
In fact, I’ve already started a small Zembly project. I don’t want to spill the beans on exactly what it does yet, except that it’s not wi-fi related. Please comment below, email or tweet @ahousley if you’re familiar with Web Services, Javascript; and keen to get involved! For now, all code generated in Zembly is open-source and can be cloned in other projects, making it less viable for some commercial projects. I’m still learning Zembly and the aim is to have fun whilst testing its true capabilities, so I only ask at this stage that the application will not be supported by paid advertising.
