zembly blog

With the curtains closing on the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, we will conclude the myPicks Beijing game on August 31st. Launching this application was a terrific experience for us. At the end, the application was always available for the entire duration. There was one comment that the performance was slow - it turned out that was a UI bug (which we fixed right away).

As mentioned earlier, we will publish a document on the architecture of this application shortly - so you too can build such deep, meaningful, scalable Facebook applications with zembly.

Congratulations to Victor Guido of Venezuela for scoring the most points. Deepak Anupalli of India came in at second place.

It seems that the wisdom of the crowd was a good indicator in predicting medal winners - given that 82% of the Gold Medal winners came from the “Favorites” tab.

We received a lot of good feedback from several people - including being named as a “Top Facebook Application” in the allaboutfacebook blog.

The best compliments that we received came from the players of the game. Here is a sampling of what was said in the myPicks Beijing discussion board:

• “We are all WINNERS and have done absolutely marvelous at this Olympic prediction game :D. Will be missing this application for the next 4 years and I hope Sun would reintroduce this awesome game for the 2012 Olympics!”, Maya in Malaysia.
• “The game was excellent”, Victor in Venezuela.
• “I just love to take part on games like this. Thanks a lot, I had great fun.”, Robin Blikle in Germany.
• “This game was the best experience I’ve lived, because I played with people of other countries similar to the true Olympic games”, Carlos in Columbia.

We look forward to seeing your Facebook applications that are powered by zembly have similar success. We are here to help make that happen.

We have been working on matching our feature set to the Facebook profile redesign for a past few weeks. While the support is not complete (facebook.admin API is not on par yet) and you need to go to Facebook developers app to do more advanced stuff, the support for the common use cases is in place. In particular, we have:

• updated Facebook adapters;
• modified default application template to fit into the new schemes around permission to access profile information and adding a profile box (Home is now an FBML widget by default);
• added “requires login” switch on Facebook app widgets (the yellow lock). If user navigates to widget that requires access to profile information, a page requesting the permission is shown first;
• a few another minor tweaks on application page.

Some samples are now up to date - BirthdayReminder and FacebookMyFavColor - and some users have even started exploring the new profile features such as Publisher, Info Sections, Application Tabs, changes in Feed Stories and more - check out MoodPix (kudos to Gail!) if you cannot wait to get started. We’ll be adding more samples and docs on these topics very soon!

Perhaps you’ve noticed the little Google button at the bottom of the widget pages and were wondering what it was…

Well, as you might guess, its purpose is to add the widget to your iGoogle home page. This works whether or not you are an author of the widget. After clicking the Google button, you’ll be redirected to Google and asked to confirm. Click the big blue “Add to Google” button and you should now see your iGoogle home page updated with the widget inside it.

Here is my iGoogle home page with girix’s weatherbug widget in it.

Time to give your favorite zembly widgets some face time on Google!

We’ve launched a cool new Facebook game today built with zembly for fans of the Olympics, called myPicks Beijing 2008.

The game lets you basically play “fantasy Olympics” by predicting medalists. Before playing, you choose a country to represent, and then as you make correct predictions, you earn points for that country. At the end of the Olympics, the country with the most points on Facebook will be crowned the winner. There are leaderboards for all players on Facebook as well as by country and friends. It’s a fun way to either collaborate or compete with your friends while you enjoy the summer games.

The app itself was built using zembly by our friends over at Pramati, and shows the kinds of things that can be done with the world’s first Facebook development environment. We’ll post more info on the architecture of the game and how it was built later for everyone to see.

Michael Coté of RedMonk recently stopped by the offices to chat with zembly CTO, Todd Fast, about the vision behind zembly, social programming, and a few things on our roadmap. You can check it out over at People Over Process, or watch it here:

Update: And here is the second part of the interview: an extensive demo of zembly, showing a Facebook app and a Facebook/iPhone hybrid app.

We are incredibly proud to announce that zembly has partnered with leading social analytics provider, Sometrics. This is great news for the thousands of developers currently using zembly who are in search of deep, relevant social analytics that tell them exactly who’s doing what on their Facebook applications.

Today’s partnership addresses a key missing piece in the zembly value chain, filling it with one of the most impressive analytics solutions on the market. As announced today, developers using zembly to create and publish social applications will now automatically receive Sometrics social analytics data to help them understand their audiences and boost traffic and revenue.

“zembly truly embraces the ‘social’ in social networking, with its collaborative approach that makes it easy for anyone to build applications. It’s a great place for developers, and we’re thrilled to be part of the community by sharing with developers our social intelligence – relevant analytics and the tools they need to put that data to good use.”

- Ian Swanson, Sometrics co-founder and CEO

“Reliable, in-depth analytics data is the critical piece developers need to help them build a thriving community and increase engagement with their applications. Sometrics is all about enabling the developer to get a unique perspective on the usage and spread of their applications. We love what Sometrics is doing – the company’s approach is extremely developer-friendly and fits perfectly with our mission of providing a collaborative place for developers to put their creativity to work.”

- Todd Fast, zembly CTO

We’re working on even more exciting ways that will allow you to easily consume Sometrics data within zembly, so keep an eye out for further updates.

Yes, we do! No tricks like “pull up” or “extract interface” yet (and tell me where you would use that anyway), but enhanced functionality around basic scenarios. From now on, when you clone an application or rename it, or rename a service within an application, we’ll make sure the source code is updated too.

In short: cloning and renaming is fixed.

Zembly was a sponsor of Facebook’s f8 conference yesterday, and we had an amazing turnout of people interested to know what zembly is and what they can do with it.

I was literally talking and doing demos for 9.5 hours, not counting a short break for the keynote, a 10-minute dinner, and a couple of bathroom breaks. I actually ended up losing my voice by the end of the night; while the conference’s upbeat vibe was cool, it would’ve been nice if they’d toned down the DJ right behind our table so I didn’t have to shout.

Naturally, the one question we were asked over and over was, “What is zembly?”. There are lots of ways to answer that question, but let me simplify from the long vision we have for the future down to two core things that zembly is today:

1. zembly is the world’s first and easiest Facebook development environment (and the same for OpenSocial and Meebo), and
2. zembly is a grand experiment in social programming

The reality is that on both counts, zembly is doing something that’s never been done before so we don’t always get things right. But that’s why we’re out here, to listen to what you want and how we can make it easier, faster, and more fun to create social apps.

We got loads of great feedback yesterday, and that’s exactly what I wanted to hear. I really thank everyone, including Chris, Dave, Jude, Arjun, Kevin, and all the others who gave us new ideas, honest critiques, and inspiration to do more cool stuff.

Just to make it crystal clear: we’re here to listen. So, if you have feedback for us, whether good or bad, please let us know over at zembly on Get Satisfaction or on the forum. Thanks!

User cwolves (aka Mark Kahn) has been building some extremely impressive graphical widgets recently, and doing so with very little code.

Even if you’re not a JavaScript ninja like him, you can make these widgets your own by cloning them (look for the action on the right side of the widget page) and then tweaking them to get interesting effects, or to put them to use in your applications. If you do, let us know in the comments and I’ll post a followup.

Please note: these widgets do not currently work in Internet Explorer. Please use Firefox.

FractalZoom

Lines of code: 78

A beautifully animated trip through a fractal space using Firefox’s Canvas.

MoleculeViewer

Lines of code: 282

A rotating, 3D view of various molecules (benzene by default), written in JavaScript and rendered using Firefox’s Canvas.

JelloPhoto

Lines of code: 186

A new twist on a photo viewer that displays photos from a Flickr account. You can view photos from your own Flickr account by using your Flickr username as the value of the strUsername parameter in the URL. Here is the JelloPhoto widget page, and here is a link to the demo.

User ytk (aka Yutaka Hosoai) has written a nice forum post on getting sometrics working with your zembly Facebook app. Sometrics provides an impressive social analytics platform that lets you see and analyze demographic information about who is installing and using your Facebook apps. Highly recommended!