We are in Sun's Menlo Camp campus, once again in the exciting Menlo Camp living room. And we've got another special guest with us. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, my name's Todd Vast. I'm the CTO for assembly.com. I just came out of stealth recently. Assembly's about building social applications. It's actually the world's first Facebook app development environment. The world's first open social development environment as well as Miibo application development environment. And what you're doing in assembly is you're doing these things using social programming. So you're developing these applications with other people using social networking type features to actually build these applications and reuse pieces and parts from other people and parts out on the web. And so what is the environment like? I mean, it's a web based thing if I remember. Right, it's browser based. So you're doing everything within the browser. So you're creating these applications, you know, just using that browser and really just your ideas for what that application can be. And then as you're building those apps and as you're putting them on those platforms, it's transparently hosted and scaled to any number of users. This is sort of a purposely naive question. But like, why do you build these apps? Hmm. I mean, I would answer that as, you know, when you look at something like the Facebook ecosystem today, I mean, the number of apps is just growing exponentially. So we had 24,000, you know, a couple months ago. Now there's something like 30,000. I think there are different reasons, but there's certainly a lot of interest that's out there. A lot of people today are thinking this is a great way to reach a lot of people. This is a great way to make some money. Brand advertisers are very interested in building some kinds of applications. And, you know, we want to enable that, but we're also looking ahead to the next step. And we kind of look at that as, you know, one way to say that would be the long tail of social applications
2:05or the idea of building situational applications. So what that means is moving past kind of those very large companies that are building applications into something like you and I share a common interest and maybe, you know, just a few hundred people, you know, would like to have an application that we can use to collaborate or do something cool. We're trying to, with Zembli, lower the barrier enough to make those kinds of applications possible. And that's where the social programming element comes in and the idea that, you know, the richness at Zembli is always getting better the more people use it. And so it becomes easier and easier to build those kinds of applications. I mean, I'm just, you know, sort of going through my developer mindset. And I would assume that you sort of take the different environments you would deploy these applications into, like you're saying Facebook or Mevo or whatnot. And have you guys sort of found the common design things across those and sort of abstracted those out? Or like, what's the approach that you go for for that kind of, for making the framework? So, you know, the reality is that today those different platforms are very heterogeneous. So, even within, you know, OpenSocial, it's very fractured and each platform has their own extensions and other capabilities. So, we're at the beginning of that, of trying to make that, you know, more consistent for the developer. What we are offering now is some tools in terms of the way you can architect those applications or divide those applications, so that you can create pieces that are reusable between the applications. But in terms of, you know, if you decide that, hey, I want to use Facebook storage for my storage mechanism, you're programming directly to the Facebook API and going for that. So, we're trying to give you some tools to kind of help you decide what's, you know, what's the best. And over time, we do intend to, you know, really make that easier and easier to get some consistency. Yeah, I was thinking about the different sorts of storage mechanisms there are in the online world nowadays.
4:05And it was reminding me back when you had to worry about if you had something in like a Windows format file system or a Mac format file system. Yeah, right. Like, you know, this problem doesn't exist anymore or maybe it exists and we don't have to pay attention to it. Right. We're sort of at that stage. Right, right. Our format is the disk in. Yeah. So, it's still a bit like that. It's a bit of, you know, it's interesting because, you know, when I started with the ideas around Assembly, it was really about let's look at the web as a platform and where are the APIs for that platform, where are the pieces and parts that I can assemble to create applications. And what we've seen before is the idea of building applications that were taking a couple of those pieces but still working within largely the same, you know, programming development paradigm that we've done for a long, long time. And so, now we're really at that very earliest stage of seeing really the web as an API, you know, as a whole. And so, yeah, everything's just like you described, right? There are all those inconsistencies and all those other stuff. Right. But there's also a lot of richness that's coming out and it's very exciting. So, we're hoping to really bring some sanity to that for developers, which is something that today is, you know, it's very difficult. It's very hard for someone to sit down and say, I'd like to use the Twitter API and the Yahoo API and the Google Maps API. And every one of those is different. How you invoke them, how, you know, how you actually even learn about them is completely different. So, you were saying that it's sort of like a social programming environment, right? And so, once you've programmed up your applications, what's the, I guess, to use maybe an old term, what's the deployment thing? How do you get into production? Right. Like, does Zimbly run it as well or? Yeah, it does. So, you know, we're trying to approach this. You know, we talked to a lot of people today that are building Facebook apps and a lot of that conversation is about, okay, I've got the idea, you know, and I've got some sample code from Facebook that kind of got me started. And then, now I've got to make that scale up. And there are companies that are helping people do that and they're doing pretty good jobs.
6:06But you still have to think about, as a developer, this idea of how do you shard your database or how do you, you know, scale up to millions and millions of rows of data or, you know, concurrency and those kinds of things. So, what we're trying to do is really just get past that conversation with something like Zimbly. Meaning that we're kind of taking this idea of, you know, this very lightweight kind of scripting development environment combined with sort of this idea of a wiki in the sense of you create something and just hit the publish button and it's immediately live. And Zimbly is doing the work of pushing that over to the platforms for you, making sure that that's up to date and then running the back end as well. And so, that's, you know, hopefully not the main part of your conversation. You think, will this scale? And, you know, the answer is, okay, you know, Zimbly will handle that for me. Right. During the run time of the application, does Zimbly, like, provide, I don't know, I'll use the old vocabulary again. Is there sort of, like, operation stuff that it provides to, like, monitor it and make sure it's working and things like that? Yeah, so, at a bit of a higher level. Yeah. So, you know, I think what most developers are interested in is, you know, the analytics of who's using their applications. Sure. And those are the real measures of success. Whereas in the past, a lot of it was around, you know, how big is the application, how many features and that sort of thing. And so, we'll actually be announcing a partnership very shortly with a company you know, to, you know, to provide those analytics to developers. And, you know, it'll be very, very deep social analytics. It'll give you, you know, a very clear idea of how much you're being used, but also by whom, what kinds of people, you know, how people are installing and installing the application and then measures of virality as well. Oh, really? No, that's fascinating. That's like a conversation I've been having with a lot of people recently of, like, the sort of new business model around stuff like this. Yeah. That has a lot of, it's a very, you know, search and SEO sort of thing where you're worried about all those things you're talking about and then figuring out converting all of that stuff into actual, I guess, sales to be all crass and crazy.
8:13Yeah. Shame on you for wanting to make money. But no, I mean, that's the kind of infrastructure that I don't think, obviously companies that are successful at it, a few of them have built it on their own essentially. Right. And there's not necessarily a reusable monetization API or, you know, whatever that is. What we're trying to do is, you know, I come from a developer tools background as well as an open source background and, you know, I'm an engineer. So, you know, I look at this as how can we make lives or, you know, make the lives of developers easier. And for the most part, you know, it takes a long time for tools to do that. And a lot of times that doesn't happen. And so, you know, we're saying, okay, here's the places where the people are, where people want to take the applications. Let's make that easy. Here's the richness of the web. You know, the web is your palette that people want to use in their applications. Let's make that easy. Here are ways to, you know, different motivations that you have for building these apps. Either monetization or for, you know, just for fame or whatever it is. Here are APIs and partners that will also make it easier. Let's bring those in and kind of, you know, combine all that to really provide that rich, you know, playground for the developer. I like the fame API. Yeah. That's a novel concept. Yeah. We're going to put that in there, right? Yeah. The last question I was interested in, since you guys are, you're part of Sun, right? Right. And, you know, I haven't been familiar with that many sort of things where sort of like there was the Sun incubator that came out of stealth or whatever. Yeah. So, like, what's that all about? Like, what's the, is that a normal sort of thing or is there? Um, no, it's kind of an interesting, you know, thing from Sun's perspective. Um, you know, when we started this, when we started this, um, you know, assembly, you know, I came out of the developer tools organization. Yeah. At Sun actually, the enterprise tools. Um, and then we started assembly within that group and we're still there in that, in the developer tools group. And, um, but, you know, when we started looking at the kinds of people that were interested in this, uh, you know, a lot of people talk about, you know, the web 2.0, uh, kind of audience and that sort of thing.
10:14Um, you know, we were able to, uh, you know, make a compelling case to, to Sun and, and, and the execs that, you know, here's, you know, here's something that is unique, that, uh, you know, has, has a chance. A chance to reach someone, but we need to, you know, target that audience and their expectations and so on. And so, uh, you know, we've run it as a Sun project. It's, we're still part of Sun. Uh, you know, we're happy to do that, uh, and, and be here cause that, that gives a lot of power behind assembly. But in terms of reaching out, we want to, you know, start the conversation is like, here's something cool, you know, let's, let's talk about that. And, you know, then, and then when the other questions come up about, well, does it scale, you know, does, is it reliable, is it all that? And that's, you know, that's so much about, you know, the Sun, uh, you know, the Sun legacy and what Sun is all about. It, it, it, it's an interesting model cause usually it's the, uh, you know, let some startup do it and then buy them afterwards. Right, yeah. Instead of, instead of spending that money on your own upfront. Yeah, exactly. Well, you, you were going to, uh, show us a demo of this stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely, I'd love to. So we'll, we'll check that out. Okay, cool. Okay, cool.