McAfee, who was able to see a demo, has the best details on the workings of the app:
In a quick demo, Lavenda opened up his standard public Facebook profile, then launched WorkBook (Worklight’s offering) just like he’d launch any other Facebook application. After he logged in, a separate section opened up within the profile. This section was devoted to the user’s employer— let’s call it Lavendaco. Inside this section were a number of standard Facebook features— friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc.—presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to Lavendaco, came from the Worklight server installed at Lavendaco, were encrypted as they travelled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers.
But I have to confess my own reaction is closer to Bill Ives, which is, wouldn’t this be pretty easy to build yourself, on top of Facebook APIs?
Maybe a good candidate for our next ONE (Optaros New Employee) training class, wherein the team does a quick project. Our Intranet is Drupal 6 based, and shouldn’t be too hard to pull that in to Facebook. I know there is already a Facebook Module for Drupal 5.x
It includes yours truly (0:42 through about 1:20) babbling on about distributed social networking and the DiSo project. (I didn’t really go prepped to give the elevator pitch for DiSo, but I think I covered the concept ok – maybe more social network portability in general than that project in particular).
Now, I took the question very much in the context of “social media” and the topic of conversation that morning, and did not go for solving things like the war in Iraq, global warming, or ending poverty on the planet. But that doesn’t mean I’m shallow, just focused.
As Mike points out, the fact that the Tamarin is an open source project, and that various people in the community have over time deciphered the SWF file format, does not make Flash anything other than a proprietary product.
In many of the presentations I give about rich Internet applications, I use a slide which looks something like this:
It’s intended to communicate two key concepts:
There are a huge number of mature, professional open source toolkits and frameworks for building RIAs.
There is strong pressure on proprietary, closed, commercial toolkits and frameworks in this space to open up, at least in terms of source code visibility and modifiability, if not in terms of redistribution.
Two exciting and (relatively) new projects this morning for those interested in social network portability, the social graph, and related concepts: Apache Shindig and DiSo. Both are critical, necessary, and sizable building blocks pointing in the direction of a free (as in freedom AND beer), open, portable, distributed social network infrastructure. Read more…
Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit and, while clicking on ads ?may? be declining, it certainly hasn’t gone away. This raises a critical question: Who are the people that click on ads?
She points out that many of the answers at this point are heavily anecdotal – the kind of assumed “middle America” we often project when we need to explain some mass behavior in which we don’t participate. What she finds, in what little research is available, is perhaps surprising: Read more…
