Sociable games

February 5th, 2006, By Duncan Gough

Like most people, I played around with Ning when it launched. I didn’t really know what to make of it and filed the link away as ‘one to come back to’.

Then I read this Techcrunch review of Ning and, more encouragingly, this follow up.

Ning is clearly working hard to recover some of the positive PR they had when they first launched and I think they’ll manage it. It’s strange to see a web2.0 product being accused of poor communication since so many of them have official blogs and developer blogs through which to spread the word. For those that don’t, the application itself tends to act as a mouthpiece for the company by providing links to staff homepages and constantly updating with news and bugfixes.

However, as good as it is to see Ning addressing these problems, I think they’re missing a huge trick. If Ning is a social playground, a place to create your own social apps on the internet, then they need to take a look at Bunchball.

Bunchball is Ning for games. Bunchball, like Ning, provides an API for users to integrate with their own ideas. Like Ning, Bunchball is probably too hard for anyone but developers (game or web) to make the most of. Bunchball lets games developers tie together their game by using the Bunchball API as a stable messaging server, in effect, providing a multiplayer API for casual games without the need to write and painfully debug all that code.

The area in which Bunchball provides a real insight into the future of web2.0 apps can be seen in this description of the ’syndicator’:

Of the big ideas, this is the biggest. Every other gaming site makes you go to them. We make it easy to take any game deployed on our platform and put it into your own web page, whether it’s a blog, a page at MySpace or Piczo or Xanga, or a custom website. So now you can play with your friends in an entirely different way, through your web page.

Genius! Ning shouldn’t be about social webapps tied to ning.com, it should be about social widgets. Like this:

What if you have multiple pages? A blog here, a TagWorld page there. You can put the same games into both pages, so it doesn’t matter where people visit you – they see the same content and can interact with each other. Have a bunch of friends that like the same music? Put the same music-sharing game in all of your pages, then whenever anyone adds a track, everyone’s page is automatically updated. Think of all these sites as siloed verticals – there is no content sharing across a Blogger blog and a MySpace page and a TypePad. But now, with Bunchball, there can be. If you put the same game into pages at all three sites, you’ve just created a link between them all, and visitors to any of them can interact with each other. You’ve just created your own little network, an undernet.

*Distributed* social playgrounds, now we’re talking.

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