Semantic Web Company

It’s true: Facebook apps can be pretty annoying, in particular because of some developers’ misconception of viral marketing as represented by the “Spam 20 friends first before using this service” feature.

But if you could write your own Facebook apps, you would avoid all those mistakes, right? Because you would write an application tailored especially to your needs and those of your friends.

If only you could write code…

Worry no longer! It seems as if the “Wiki for Code” has finally arrived with zembly, a web service currently in private beta where users, according to its claim, can “easily create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web.”

Now this may sound too good to be true, yet it is: On the last day of your KiWi-meeting in Prague, I was able to attend a demo session of zembly given by Jiri Kopsa, one of the engineers in the developer organization connected to Sun Microsystems who are currently working on zembly.

No additional software needs to be installed – using just their browser, users can develop applications for several popular social platforms, including Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, build apps for their iPhone or other embeddable widgets.

In the demo we were given, Jiri showed us how create a widget that automatically requests the latest Flickr picture. We then deployed the widget on iGoogle as an automatically updating image widget – all that done in considerably less than five minutes. (more…)