Veteran Open Source businessman Bob Bickel will launch his new company Ringside Networks at the Open Source Business Conference tomorrow and he’s set his sites high. Ringside will let developers easily port Facebook apps to any other website and it will integrate company websites with social graph and communication features back at Facebook.
That’s just the beginning. The goal is to offer a system that integrates social applications across any site on the web.
While app developers will appreciate the ease in doing so, the integration of communication paths could hit a sweet spot for companies overwhelmed with the number of social network options they face. Ringside Networks would create a central place to communicate across any number of networks through any application that resides on them all.
How will Ringside navigate the closely guarded privacy of Facebook social graph information in particular? We’ll see!
Details are still sketchy about the company, but Ringside’s got the ear of several heavy hitters in the Open Source world. Matt Asay wrote up a general review of the effort at CNet last week and called it “one of the most interesting open-source opportunities in the market today.” The company has taken funding from the prestigious Matrix Partners.
Some more hints are available on Bickel’s blog, Thoughts from the Ringside.
While all the different containers in OpenSocial drag their feet and splinter their offerings, it makes perfect sense for an Open Source, standards-based competitor to step in and put their money where their mouths are. The company promises lots of API extensibility, as well.
The Ringside website won’t go live until probably Tuesday morning, West Coast time, but you might be able to get in touch using the old info email form they had posted until recently. This should be one worth watching.
