I am talking about the just released MyPicks U.S. Election 2008 - New Social Networking Application for MySpace and Facebook - Created with Zembly. Read the official press release from Sun Microsystems here.

This game for Facebook and MySpace users, was built by Pramati on the Zembly platform from Sun. The second game to be built for product promotion, after the recent myPicks Beijing 2008. While the game itself was built in a record 3 week time, it also brings out a very interesting point about how Facebook and Myspace communities can be treated as a combined user base. For example, a Myspace or Facebook user could vote and see how voters on the other community are doing.

Here is a snapshot and I strongly urge you to take shot at the game MyPicks U.S. Election 2008.

Tell-a-Friend was initially built as a feature inside a ‘product reviews’ widget built as part of our effort to add the ‘Social’ twist to shopping sites. Many who saw, were asking for this feature to be available outside and independently usable. They told us the use cases, word of mouth for ecommerce sites, contest on promote a new product launch, spread a press release (PR 2.0) and why enhancing word of mouth was important to them. Thus Tell-a-Friend was born.

Tell-a-Friend aims to be the best Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) tool that is preferred by website builders and bloggers worldwide.

Great to see a lot of entrepreneurial activity in the Indian software industry. NEN has been doing a great job of bringing people together to create visibility for startups.

From a country with great engineering talent and high visibility into the global software industry, it should be certain and sooner that world-class products start coming out. Check out the startups, vote for them, if you find something really interesting.

For those of you interested in nominating your company or your friends, the nominations for the contese closes on Oct 22.

Those of you who visited Java.com or other sites of Sun Microsystems might have noticed a promotional game called myPicks Beijing 2008. This game was developed by Pramati for promotion of Sun’s launch of a new product called Zembly. The game was launched on Facebook to not only demonstrate the use of Zembly as a social applications platform but also spread word about this new offering to a large base of Facebook users. The viral elements of the game, high Olympics spirit and some word of mouth marketing using Tell-a-Friend widget, led to easier spread and indirect promotion of the newly launched product.

If you are curious about what the game does, play the game at Facebook while the Games are on, or watch this youtube video.

An example of how Social Media and Social Networks can be used in marketing.

Web does not exclude anyone. While most web 2.0 sites/services are targeting the young, BigscreenLive brings a special service for senior citizens.

UI challenge of creating an interface for seniors is big. We had a great time working with BigScreenLive team in developing it. For developers on the project, putting themselves in the user’s shoe was not easy. After all an apparently simple task might be challenging for seniors. The touch screen interface was also a new for the team. Pramati team had good learning on how to make software interface easy to use. The BigScreenLive team was great to work with on this very interesting project.

Another highlight of the project was use of Ruby on Rails. ROR came very handy in this case where the requirements were extremely loose. It helped us iterate very fast, quick to and fro, and sometimes bring changes in less than 3 days.

Read product review here.

Pramati Technologies recently signed an OEM Agreement with NETGEAR, Inc. Under this agreement Dekoh Media Sharing Platform will be shipped with ReadyNAS product targeted at home consumers market. Home users who are experiencing explosive growth in their digital photo collection can buy ReadyNAS ($399 on Amazon now for 500GB) and they will get easy-to-use ReadNAS Photos, which is rebranded and customized Dekoh Photos.

Users can easily import, organize and transfer photos on their PC to their NAS storage for lifelong archival and also sharing with friends or family. Dekoh Photos will enable users to selectively share photos with who they want and no software installation is required for those who would see the pictures and they would be served directly out of NAS.

For those of you technical, who would like to know why Dekoh, here are a few key points:

• Dekoh simplifies setup required to make NAS content accessible from outside internet, even when the NAS is behind firewall or DSL (no static IP address). Earlier, home users had to install additional open source software, obtain dynamic IP, open ports, etc.
• Dekoh gives better user experience with its Ajax interface, which today’s web 2.0 users have come to expect. NAS by itself has limited CPU power and memory for sophisticated user tools.

More in my next posting on Dekoh architecture and how it can play a central role at digital homes where device-PC-Web should come together for better user experience.

More and more, hardware vendors are finding that Web 2.0 technologies can be a good way to improve the end user experience of their devices…read posting by Om Malik.

L1 platform. Loosely coupled REST/SOAP based API integration. Example: Flickr API.

L2 platform. More deeper integration of developer’s application injecting into the platform UI. Example: Facebook API.

L3 platform. A runtime that hosts developer code. Example: Ning.

Marc’s argument that L3 platform are the best, is certainly questionable and Josh makes points in this line. While a scalable web platform with Social Networking API is a powerful one, expecting others to bring their users and user data to your hosted platform is not in the best interest of the company/group that wants to add those features to an existing site/application.

A better solution could be a add-on social networking platform with API which the company/group can co-host and integrate. They get to keep their users and user data and can achieve better integration.

This is like a “Web 2.0 Application Server” as shown in the picture below. Deployed alongside the current Web 1.0 website and can provide social networking features overlayed on top of it.

Would this be more acceptable to those currently on using web as a Web1.0 platform and would like to add social networking among their users (use web as a Web2.0 platform)?

Desktop integration helps websites and consumer brands increase interaction with the user and offer valuable and timely alerts that can benefit the user. As long as the user has control on receiving such alerts and these widgets don’t mess up the computer (desktop icon, startup program, tray icon etc.), it serves a great purpose for the user. These widgets act as agents on behalf of the user to filter content and bring useful information periodically.
Technorati Tags: Desktop, Dekoh, Desktop Widget

Writing applications using markup instead of platform-API-based code is so much more easier. Browser-based UI brings significant advantage of using combined teams with programmers (who generally can’t build great looking UI) and graphics and UI specialists (who can’t wire it up with the backend). The last decade of focus for developers has largely been on building to the web. The programming model and the deployment environment are all too familiar.

A browser-based application need not necessarily mean a hosted application, when a desktop runtime such as Dekoh can serve to your local browser. You have the twin advantage of a common environment for quickly building to the desktop (and web) as well as a fluent integration between the such desktop applications with existing web applications. The best way to build web-desktop integrated applications of the future.

Technorati Tags: Desktop, RIA, Rich Internet Applications, Dekoh