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We’ve started taking advantage of Facebook’s special swf tag and now your Sharendipity creations will play directly inside your Facebook feeds when you post them!
Now you can easily share custom apps that are unique to your friends and they can interact with them just like it’s a video. No more new tabs or windows to launch the app elsewhere.
Application Sharing
These are the steps I followed to share an app with my wife to share my Christmas list.
1. Copy the URL of the app
Copy the URL from your browser’s address bar for the application you’d like to share. Each application has its own asset page.
2. Use Facebook post to share the app
You can share your link directly on a friend’s page (if they are permitting it) or you can share it on your own wall. In this case, I posted it directly to my wife’s wall.
Alternatively, you can use the AddThis share options found on the asset page to post or email your application directly to Facebook.
Application Play
Once you’ve posted the application, anyone that finds it within the feed can play it directly. By default, the post will appear with the normal blue play button just like a video.
The feed will automatically grow to create room, and your friends can interact with the application, comment, and share it with their network.
What custom app would you like to share with your friends? Maybe a custom slide show?
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We’re really excited to be the winners of the first Ning Appathon today. We won for the best “ported application” category and received a cool $4,000!
Ning had a pretty prestigious group judging the contest…
Submissions for our weeklong competition were judged by Wired Editor-in-chief and DIY Drones Network Creator Chris Anderson, Ning Chairman and Co-founder Marc Andreessen, and blogger and Managing Director of building43 Robert Scoble. The competition began on Nov. 5 with all submissions due on Nov. 12. The entrants were judged on creativity, usability, how well they integrate with Ning Networks, viral features, and usefulness.
It’s more than just an app
One of things we’re most excited about is the transformation we went through as part of this project. This is much more than just a Ning app for us. After all, Ning users have long been able to post their Sharendipity creations inside Ning using the standard embed code.
When we decided to go after this prize, we set the bar very high. We wanted to syndicate the entire software development process. To provide a set of tools that let anyone run their own development site.
This will mean that a teacher can create a template that allows her students to develop their own interactive study guides. And a niche gaming network can run their own game creation contest. All from within their own website, blog, or Ning network.
We aimed to build one application that delivered the creation tools, community aggregation tools, and a means for individual users to interact with their own creations – all in a nice bundle and tightly integrated with the OpenSocial standard. We’re thrilled that Ning recognized us for this achievement!
There’s more to come!
The Ning community provides us with an awesome opportunity to explore niche, custom software development. We’re excited to see what kinds of applications they can create now that the barrier for software creation has been significantly lowered.
Over the next several weeks we’ll talk more about how our tools can be syndicated outside of sharendipity.com. And we’ll help the Ning users leverage our platform to do even more. We’d like to give them the tools to submit their own software to the Ning application directory.
Here’s the official Ning press release.
Tags:
announcements,
ning
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Communication is incredibly important in a startup. Every member of your team needs to be aware of what everyone else is doing, the direction the company is going in, funding status, you name it… As soon as the lines of communication break down, chaos ensues. People start thrashing, productivity plummets and you have to work to regain a decent level of efficiency.
At Sharendipity, we’ve tried just about everything we can to open up those lines of communication. As a technology-driven startup, a lot of this focuses on communicating information about the product such as code changes, feature requests, the roadmap, etc. Regardless of the company’s focus and what information needs to be communicated, Yammer provides a great way to keep the ball rolling.
Early Attempts at Communication
BugZilla
In the beginning we thought that BugZilla would help track a lot of the discussions. At the time, we were coding in Java and there was a nice Eclipse plugin called Mylyn that integrated with BugZilla. But when it came down to it, BugZilla is just clunky and didn’t fit into our workflow very well. We’d have to go back to the BugZilla web page constantly to run reports and prioritize and assign bugs. And it didn’t really help with planning out our roadmap.
An Internal Wiki
We thought that we’d just do away with BugZilla and keep track of everything ourselves on an internal wiki. This way we could maintain pages for the wiki, keep bug lists and feature requests, and cross-reference things when necessary. It worked fairly well for a while but gradually became less effective. Again, maintaining the wiki didn’t fit into our daily workflow. In addition, communicating updates wasn’t as easy because it would come through your email. As a result, the wiki would grow out of date or get messy and someone would have to take some time to fix it up. This was never fun.
An Internal Blog
The blog was a lot easier to manage and fit into our workflow better. When someone made a checkin, we would duplicate the checkin note to the blog so that people could see it. We were edging ourselves towards the real-time communication that we didn’t really know we needed. The problem with using the blog was that, even with RSS feeds, it was still out of your normal workflow. You’d have to make an effort to go check up on what had been done. It did let us integrate all types of communication in a single environment though. The wiki achieved this as well, but we didn’t see the information as a stream like we did with the blog.
What this ultimately comes down to is a problem of interfacing with the blog. If we had a desktop client like Yammer’s, the blog would have worked a lot better. Sure, we could have written a little desktop app that would notify us when there was a new post. But this was before Yammer and before AIR. More importantly, we didn’t know that it was a problem.
Why Yammer Solves the Communication Gap
Yammer provides a stream of information that is easily accessible. It’s also in reach of everything that I do as a coder, but unobtrusive enough that it doesn’t distract from a task at hand. If something urgent comes up, I can address it. Otherwise, at least I know that I need to address it when I get a chance.
The important point is that Yammer fits into our workflow incredibly well. I don’t have to go to a webpage to see what’s going on; the yammer client is always running on my desktop. Nor do I have to make an attempt to see if something was posted recently; it pops up automatically. In addition to fitting into my daily routine, Yammer also provides some nice features that make my life even easier.
Threaded Communication
I love that Yammer solves the problem of having to dig through BugZilla to find comments about a bug. In Yammer, I can just look at the thread and see what someone had to say about it. It also solves the problem of adding comments to a wiki (there are a few that do this but you can’t follow comments about updates or individual items on a page). The important part though, and I can’t stress this enough, is that Yammer facilitates a discussion around everything that is going on in our company.
Using Hashtags Effectively
One of my favorite features of Yammer (and Twitter) is the use of hashtags. There are primarily five types of information that I’m concerned with on a daily basis: checkins, bugs, feature requests, roadmap discussions, and general office information (e.g. “Out of the office until 10 this morning”). When posting to Yammer, we can communicate the type of information in a hashtag by applying any one of #checkin, #bug, #feature, #roadmap, or #office. Furthermore, we can call attention to a post by appending #urgent to it. We can also add other differentiating tags such as #client or #server.
Directed Communication
Oftentimes, I want to communicate something only to one person. As long as it isn’t private, my post can call that person’s attention by simply appending the @ symbol to their username. Oddly, in contrast to the way Twitter is used, most of our communication isn’t person-to-person. But when it is, I can simply ask someone a question on Yammer, or answer theirs.
Distributed Communication
One of the other important aspects regarding our usage of Yammer is that it enables distributed communication incredibly easily. It’s pretty common that we aren’t all in the office at the same time. Someone will be meeting with a potential investor, someone will be in Germany, or someone will be at the coffee shop. If we aren’t in front of our laptops, most of us have iPhones so we can check in on what’s going on using the Yammer app from just about anywhere.
What We’d really like to see from Yammer (and the Yammer community)
Better Search
The truth is that we still have to maintain some documentation outside of Yammer. We still have to know which bugs are outstanding or which discussions involving the roadmap aren’t complete. I want a way to search all threads that have been tagged with #bug, but haven’t been tagged with #complete. Or if I want to see all of the client-side checkins in the past two days, show me everything tagged #checkin and #client for that time period. Broadening search capabilities is a great place to start expanding the functionality.
A Better Desktop Client (this may have happened)
This topic may be a little late. I just updated to the most recent one yesterday and it’s working very well. Previously however, stability and bugs have been a big problem. Here’s hoping that it continues to improve.
Third-party integration
I know that there’s an API. But I don’t have time to implement anything with it. If there were a few smart people out there though, they’d start integrating their applications with Yammer. Take BugZilla for example. How amazing would it be if BugZilla integrated with Yammer? Every time I posted something to Yammer tagged #bug, a new one was created in BugZilla. If a reply to that post was tagged #complete, BugZilla would mark the bug as closed. You can take this further to assign bugs, set priorities, etc. This would solve my problem above of requiring better search capabilities, and I wouldn’t have to go replicate content already posted to Yammer myself.
I’m guessing that there are a lot of similar applications that could benefit from this. What about CMS apps? Salesforce? Imagine a few hundred people generating leads for your company, communicating progress and updating your company’s records at the same time. How huge would that be…
So Go Use It
If you aren’t using Yammer, you probably should be. It’s incredible what happens in a startup when the founders aren’t communicating well. At that point, you become as effective and mobile as the Big Blue’s you’re trying to compete with.
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With our new Flash editing tools in Sharendipity, it has never been easier to build custom Facebook applications. We have super tight integration with the Facebook platform. Through RESTful web services, you can access the profiles, groups, and photos of your entire social graph within your Sharendipity creation! Furthermore, the new architecture makes it drop-dead simple to integrate the work of others to access this information so you aren’t required to re-invent the wheel to do things like fetch the profile data of your friends.
For example, after searching the Sharendipity community for “facebook” you’ll find a number of reusable elements that help you interface with Facebook. Some elements, such as “Facebook Service – friends get” are web services that are responsible for reading data from the Facebook API. Other elements, such as “Facebook User” are data structures that help encapsulate information about various Facebook values. Most of the time, the web services will return data structures to make it easier for you to access data. By using these higher level elements, you aren’t required to understand anything about the underlying web services.
Example Applications
There are a few applications already built using these reusable components. Whether it is a game or a utility, we know there are lots of opportunities to create engaging, expressive, and useful applications using the information from your Facebook network.
- Who Be Me? is a game that tests your knowledge of your friends by displaying photos of three random friends along with a random fact extracted from their profile information. The player must choose the friend that matches the fact.
- The Facebook Photo Browser is an application that lets you browse the Facebook photos of your entire network all in one place.
- Facebook Photo Scramble is a puzzle game that randomly selects a photo from your friends’ photos and challenges you to reconstruct a scrambled version of the photograph.
Network Integration
Just is the case with any game built on Sharendipity, you also get a variety of features that connect you and your application with all of your friends on Facebook.
- High score management
- A commenting system for your application
- In-game achievements
- The infrastructure for your friends to challenge each other in scoring duels
All of these features tap into the Facebook notification system to help you spread your work virally.
Get Started Today
What Facebook application have you been wanting to build? Get started by accessing Sharendipity through your Facebook account.
Tags:
Facebook
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This week’s release is a pretty exciting one. For quite a while now we’ve been discussing how exactly to implement user-defined application achievements as well as our own Sharendipity achievements. Well we’ve settled on a plan and we’re happy to announce a new Achievements feature available to all application creators.
Achievements are a way to establish goals for playing a game or using an application. Sometimes they’re difficult accomplishments, such as reaching a new high score, and sometimes they’re just for fun. Either way, it gives application creators a new way to engage their users and allows your friends to see what you’ve been up to in Sharendipity .
One example of a Sharendipity achievement is the Application Creator, which you can earn by publishing your own application in Sharendipity. As shown below, when these achievements are earned your Facebook friends will be notified through their news feeds (if you are using a Facebook account):
There are additional Sharendipity achievements for both creators and players, such as reaching a certain number of plays for one of your creations, or ranking first place in a published game.
You can create your own achievements through a new option in the Director menu under the Application heading. The Achievements Manager dialog will display all achievements that have been defined for an application, allowing you to create new achievements and edit existing ones.
To highlight how some of the achievements might be used, I’ve also published a new game called Block Boxer. This is the view that I see as the creator of the achievements:
The game itself is pretty challenging but a lot of the fun is in trying to unlock all of the achievements. Here are a few more games that have new achievements :
Scramble, a sliding-puzzle game that uses the Flickr interestingness feed.
Dodge, a game where you have to avoid the enemies by moving your mouse.
For more information and discussion about the Achievements feature, check out the Wiki page.
Tags:
announcement
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In what might be the geekiest marriage proposal ever, a programmer named Bernie Peng proposed to his girlfriend by custom-programming a Bejeweled game to pop the question when she reached a certain score. After posting the news on his blog, the news swept across the Internet. Here is some coverage on CNN and Engadget.
PopCap Games, the makers of Bejeweled, were so impressed they’re donating Bejeweled games for the wedding guests, and money for “jewel-themed decorations” at the reception. (Perhaps this will be the geekiest wedding reception ever as well…)
Other people have developed widgets or used Twitter to propose marriage, but this may be the first proposal by videogame! (Although an alert Engadget reader found this comic from a few years ago.)
These proposals are examples of people finding new, more interesting ways to communicate using digital technology. Sharendipity is an ideal tool for this type of communication! We don’t expect a flood of custom marriage proposals, but we do expect people to use Sharendipity to send a custom birthday card, or invite someone to dinner, or, well who knows what people will come up with.
It took Mr. Peng about a month to develop his Nintendo game. Sharendipity makes this easier. Here’s a birthday greeting created in a few minutes by customizing the TossWord game.
What types of greetings or custom games could you come up with in Sharendipity?
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There were two keynotes for the Casual Games Summit this year, one yesterday from PlayFirst, and one today from Microsoft Casual Games. To my surprise, it was actually Chris Early from Microsoft who expressed more of a core understanding of the future of casual games.
Before Chris’s talk, I was a bit dismayed at the content in the Casual Games Summit. There’s a lot of recapping about what casual games are: who the target demographic is; what the target platforms are; etc. If you’re here at GDC, chances are you already know this.
Chris realizes that casual games need to continue to innovate. The one statement that summed it up best was that we need to continue to look at casual games as “brand new,†a territory whose horizon is always evolving. Specifically, he understands that innovation in casual games is happening through social networks and the activities involved therein.
Among the specific topics Chris has noticed in casual game innovation are asynchronous play, the ability to play with your friends, mini-games as multiple winning opportunities, data persistence, and pyramiding through the social graph. He knows that the portals need to embrace change, and he’s got the right idea. As an indication, yesterday’s talk on Social Gaming was in front of a crowd that can’t even be described as standing-room only:
To his credit, I’ll also mention that John Welch from PlayFirst had a few key points. One: the minority is still happy with the $20 price model and that we require new business models. Two: casual games are still dominated by clones.
What does this all mean? My hope is that it shows that there will be additional support from those who recognize these facts, enabling the true innovators to get their ideas to market faster, providing new business models for developers to capitalize on their creations. You can see this in the explosion of companies such as SGN, Zynga, and of course, Sharendipity.
It’s worth adding that innovation can come from anywhere – including you – so come innovate using Sharendipity and distribute your creations to your friends!