Zembly is a new social collaboration platform where users members can build and share code together. The neat thing about Zembly is that it contains many of the features of a collaborative social platform (think facebook, wiki, etc.), yet the purpose for being there is all about building widgets, services and applications for other web sites. One attractive characteristic is that it is “tricked out”, to make it easy to deploy to some of the more popular collaborative tools on the web today such as igoogle, Facebook, Meebo and even the iPhone. The home page sports the OpenSocial logo as well. In this case I think standards are good.
In some ways, you can think of zembly like Wikipedia for social applications—a wiki for live, editable code that is more than just about trivial widgets, but rather about full-fledged social applications that can tap into the social graph and reach millions of users.
Another interesting feature is the key chain. Each member gets to store their various api keys for services such as Amazon, Google, facebook, Flickr apis in a handy central place. I like this because really I haven’t figured out any other good way to keep track of my keys. I probably have multiple keys from google, only because I either couldn’t remember where I saved the key the last time, or it was some other machine…
Anyway the first thing to try with Zembly is the 5 minute weather widget. It’s pretty easy to do, but be warned it took me more than 5 minutes. But that’s most likely because I’m somewhat of a copy paste spaz. Anyway I got it to work this morning and with one click of a button I had it deployed to my personal igoogle page. That was cool! But wait there’s more. With a simple copy paste I should be able to drop it in to this blog entry. Here it goes:
That was easy. Click on the get weather button above and you’ll see the weather here in Fairport. Or enter your own zip code. Ok, so this is just a demo, weather might not be that impressive so I’ll be thinking about something more entertaining for the next Zembly widget I make.
On a final thought, my mind is churning on the proposed paradigm shift here. In the past we’ve tended to think of software as being more focused and somewhat “monolithic”, even applications that are highly interoperable and share common APIs tend to be developed by somewhat well defined teams and are contained in focused projects. So what happens when the application development process becomes increasingly more social, granular and more “loosely coupled”? In a social container like Zembly the rate of Darwinian evolution of services, widgets and social applications might just crank up a notch or two.
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