

Hull.io, an open platform for social apps - romain_dardour
http://hull.io

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d0m
Looks very interesting, I've subscribed to the beta. But to be honest, I
haven't totally _grasped_ what and how it works.

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.

~~~
romain_dardour
It's a full stack hosted platform. It allows you to build social apps by
combining javascript widgets.

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.

~~~
Lerc
>when building a social app, you always need user authentication, friends
lists, collections, ratings, comments ...

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.

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afandian
Hull. Heh. Now it's England's turn for a not-quite-internationally-unloaded
brand name.

~~~
andyjohnson0
And whats wrong with Hull? A great city. Care to step outside for a moment?

~~~
afandian
Beautiful scenery, a very fine telephone system!

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rickcecil
Is it all javascript based? So it would integrate with any codebase? Rails,
Python, Java?

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?

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RossM
I get a few JS errors which might explain why the form sends me to a 404 :)
Otherwise, I'm interested!

    
    
      Uncaught ReferenceError: hljs is not defined app-d67d5454e46882e797b76228d86a0737.js:1
      Failed to load resource http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
      Uncaught ReferenceError: _gat is not defined ignition.1.1.js:509
    

Given the Google Analytics, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a network
issue on my end.

~~~
romain_dardour
Sorry, launchrock seems to choke a bit, we're having a __LOT __of traffic
right now.

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tchock23
I like the concept. There is a lot of redundancy whenever you go to start a
new social app.

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...

~~~
romain_dardour
Good advice, thank you for the frank words.

We tried very hard to keep the home page clean, maybe a bit too much so then.

~~~
yahelc
I signed up for Beta access. One minor discomfort and some friendly advice:
The thank you text says "Thanks for joining the brotherhood". You might want
to stay away from language that's exclusionary to 50% of the population, and a
great majority of social media users, even if it's solely intended as fun,
jocular page copy.

~~~
romain_dardour
Noted. thanks :)

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anujkk
You implemented one of my long list of ideas - Social Network As A Service. It
looks really nice and promising. Good luck. A demonstration of all social
widgets all a demo social network using those widgets will be very nice.

BTW, there is a typo on this page - <http://hull.io/about> . It should be
developing instead of "developping".

~~~
romain_dardour
Thanks Anuj, it's been our vision from the start. The demo is along these
lines, and is coming soon.

Thanks for the notice too.

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cbsmith
When you look at the list of "things you need to do" that Hull.io takes care
of, almost all of them are things that a modern CMS needs to do as well. The
major exception being the social graph, which is a pretty trivial thing to
add, and often these days it makes sense to just hang off of OpenGraph.

~~~
romain_dardour
CMS are mainly document-centric, whereas Hull is interaction-centric.

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.

~~~
xcambar
To go further the comparison with CMS, maybe it's time to coin a new term for
what Hull has to offer. Social as a Service is a good one, but it's somehow
not showing how easy the integration can be with Hull.

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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TheMakeA
Seems sort of like Zapier-for-Social-Networking. I'm impressed. Keep up the
good work!

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melvinmt
> invites start january 1st, 2013.

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.

~~~
romain_dardour
"Real Artists Ship" — Steve

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svetlyak40wt
Features description sounds too marketing and too bullshit.

1) Where are real usage examples? 2) Where is even one use-case? 3) What can
be built on top of it?

~~~
romain_dardour
Use cases and hands-on demos are coming really soon.

What can be built on top of it is up to your imagination.

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pbnjay
Sounds a lot like Ning about 7 years ago. Maybe a few more features, but I
still don't see a big difference, or a huge demand for niche social networks.

~~~
romain_dardour
Hull is not a point-and-click social network creator. It's a developer
platform.

And who says the networks those will build will be niche ;) ?

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eduardordm
It looks like a very sophisticated and useful platform.

I might be wrong but it looks like 'open' and 'privacy' are in a collision
course.

~~~
romain_dardour
Open pertains to the technology. Privacy is something we take seriously.

~~~
eduardordm
I understand that. And I believe you.

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.

~~~
romain_dardour
We're a social platform.

That means developers will build social apps and networks on top of our
product.

The choice of being integrating with Twitter or Facebook, and exchanging data
with those networks is something the application will decide to do or not.

On the other hand, We will never sell the data on our platform, because it
doesn't even belong to us, but to the developers using our product.

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demosquared
Great name and a very promising proposition. I like it.

Are there any working examples/implementations (besides the technical
preview)?

~~~
romain_dardour
There are, We're putting working hard to polish those so they shine brighter
than anything.

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oboizt
Will we be able to explore the code and develop before making the choice to
purchase the service and support?

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mxuribe
This certainly sounds interesting. I signed up for priv. beta...Let's see what
happens on 1/1/13.

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TallboyOne
Not to be confused with hell.io, one of my more proud domain purchases :)

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sgdesign
Looks very promising, congrats for the launch. Also, nice site!

~~~
romain_dardour
Thanks Sacha ;)

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marmaduke
I'm pretty sure it's spelled "instantiate" not "instanciate."

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romain_dardour
Thanks for the heads up, will be fixed quickly

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killahpriest
I'm pretty sure it's spelled "hello" not "hullo."

~~~
romain_dardour
:)

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DjebbZ
Waiting for the private beta to start.

