Sociable games, continued

February 23rd, 2006, By Duncan Gough

My post on Sociable Games generated some interesting feedback from Ning and Bunchball alike.

Bunchball have announced their second coming with a positive review from Techcrunch, complete with an embedded example of how Bunchball can turn games into a true, realtime social medium. Their messaging service is very powerful, idealistically and actually. Just imagine how Bunchball could solve the problem of tracking and following up a users disparate comments to several blogs, all of which can be combined to create a meta-discussion, if blogs used a version of Bunchball for comments. My comment on your blog could be extracted and repeated on any other blog using their messaging system. Just as your comment on any other blog could be pinged over here to suttree.com, where relevant.

Ning are also on the ball. Their website is more about DIY with the tools you’re provided, and BYO (build-your-own) given the framework that’s in place, but they’re still on the trail of sociable widgets. Distributed playgrounds, as I called them last time. What’s Cuter? is an example ‘hot or not’ style widget that can be embedded outside of Ning using a couple of lines of Javascript. Having spent some time looking at the kind of firewall ‘punch through’ code that game developers use for their own multiplayer client/server applications, like the Torque Network Library, I can see problems with websites using pure javascript alone to distribute anything more powerful than these simple example widgets. However, although Bunchball could programatically get around such problems (without the end-user seeing all the hacks), it would still require a flash movie which isn’t going to be so popular on a blog.

The real question, then, is can I create a AJAX interface to Bunchball to provide comment tracking and distributed conversations across blogs?

« In the news…How Did I Get Here? »