The Bell Video Store movie downloading site is live. It uses social features served up from our PeopleAggregator platform. This ‘widgetization technique’ allows Bell to provide social features and build a community of movie download customers. Congrats to our team members in Christ Church, NZ (Phil), Sebastopol, CA (David) and Nurenberg, Germany (Martin) for this great project!

This is an example of what I call “bringing social to software”. I also use this term when referring to teh strategy that Google, MySpace and Facebook are engaging in - currently.

The general idea is that one doesn’t have to build a stand alone social network anymore. People are members of lots of social networks and social features need to be embedded into ALL software - in the future.

This is one of the things our platform can do. And is doing with Bell Canada. As of today.

This is how it works.

1. We federate the two ID systems together - and we run a ’shadow’ account of the user in our world. Bell’s code is ASP .Net - while we’re a php5 platform.

2. We also shadow their content database of movies, TV Shows and actors.

3. When a movie page comes up, the movie description, transaction handling and CDN are all Bell’s code. But the Reviews, Comments, Fan of, Tagging - is all coming off of our servers.

4. Our code plops the social features into their pages.  This could also work with Java, Ruby, Python, whatever.

5. Bell was originally attracted to us because of our support for OpenID. We’re about to start projects with sister sites and they want to connect them all together using OpenID. But once we got started we realized we need a different technique then normal API exposure or web services calls - to “bring social to Bell” - so we invented something we call ‘widgetization’.

6. We componentize the entire PeopleAggregator platform and can selectively offer any feature - isolated in a widget or combined with any other set of features. It’s totally coolio and one of the things that differentiate our platform - from the rest.

Tags are coming - and lots more.

Only gotcha - you have to live in Canada to use this service.  Those are the only rights they have.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.