Call me a fool but I very like small stories.. For instance, "John wants to create a pet website. [Bla bla] is very complicated. Now comes Hull.io, [Bla bla]".
Most of the website is focused on features but I feel the Why and How are missing. Is it Drag&Drop of widgets? Am I free to code anything I want? Is it a framework that I npm install? Where will it be hosted? Etc.
* Edit: Found most of my answers in the /about page.
Instead of serving canned social plugins, with a few config options, we let developers complete control over those widgets, and let them extend and create new ones.
The Why is that when building a social app, you always need user authentication, friends lists, collections, ratings, comments ...
When developing from scratch, You always have to come up with an architecture, set up data retreival and storage, and debug social mechanics
We offer developers to skip the setup part and the debugging part and just start from something that already works.
I think that presupposes what the task will be too much. It is facilitating social apps as they are today rather than how they could be.
At the fundamental level, what is needed is Authentication and authorised data access. The authorisation system is one where data can be conditionally detected, accessed and modified by specific identities. That will allow friends lists, collections, ratings, comments etc. without dictating the form those things should take.
The authorisation mechanism is a hard problem™. I think it isn't impossible though.
* Comments on Facebook's platform
* Incorporate Twitter @replies
* Login/create account
Etc.
Quick recommendation - I clicked through three pages before I got to the "About" page, and it wasn't until I got to that page that I fully understood why something like this is important.
I would have put more of that "About" content on the very first page so people know why they should care about it. Just my two cents...
We tried very hard to keep the home page clean, maybe a bit too much so then.
In hindsight, maybe it just needs something snappy like "It's like a CMS for your next social app" (or an equivalent analogy), like startups coming out of YC often do for demo day. "An open platform for social apps" made me pause a bit too long because it's a relatively new concept.
I might be wrong but it looks like 'open' and 'privacy' are in a collision course.
But my feeling is this: even though hull will take my privacy seriously, facebook, twitter, will not. By integrating those services it will not be completely up to hull to secure my privacy, specially with the low tactics used by facebook.
I think is relevant to share this feeling I have. Nowadays I find myself agreeing with RMS more and more.
> Privacy is something we take seriously.
The social mechanics are available for those CMS as plugins, yes, but you need to work out how to integrate them, when they're made by different developers, and write glue code.
A big strengh of hull is also it's client-side widgets library, that just work and allow you to combine and extend them easily.
Lastly, hanging off OpenGraph does not make you the owner of the data.
Hull provides devs with tools to integrate the social activity of their users, which looks like a "SoMS" or "SoMaS" (Social Management System) to me. Too bad SMS can hardly be used ;-)
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BTW, there is a typo on this page - http://hull.io/about . It should be developing instead of "developping".
Thanks for the notice too.
Assuming I actually get the invite on Jan 1st, it's the first time ever I felt like I didn't sign up to a beta black hole.
1) Where are real usage examples? 2) Where is even one use-case? 3) What can be built on top of it?
What can be built on top of it is up to your imagination.
And who says the networks those will build will be niche ;) ?
Are there any working examples/implementations (besides the technical preview)?
Very excited about this. Social is such a critical aspect of many systems these days, but it's another piece of the puzzle that doesn't actually distinguish one product from the competition.
The more great services like this that get built, the more great products are going to get built.
I am very excited to see what Hull can do for companies like mine that need this kind of functionality, but have been focused more on our unique value proposition.
Who can we bribe to get into the beta?