Hull.io, an open platform for social apps | Hacker News Reader

Hull.io, an open platform for social apps

hull.io

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.

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.

>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.

This still doesn't give a lot of info. Frame it more in terms of use cases i.e.

* Comments on Facebook's platform

* Incorporate Twitter @replies

* Login/create account

Etc.

tl;dr: it's a hosted framework, or so it seems.

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

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

Beautiful scenery, a very fine telephone system!

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?

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.

Sorry, launchrock seems to choke a bit, we're having a LOT of traffic right now.

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...

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.

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.

Noted. thanks :)

The homepage is so clean and compelling that I scrolled down to learn more, causing me to miss the "About" link in the primary nav and use the learn more links on the bottom of each page. That might not be typical of most people browsing the site, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

In hindsight, maybe it just needs something snappy like "It's like a CMS for your next social app" (or an equivalent analogy), like startups coming out of YC often do for demo day. "An open platform for social apps" made me pause a bit too long because it's a relatively new concept.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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

> 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.

"Real Artists Ship" — Steve

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?

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

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

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.

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 ;) ?

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.

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

    > Privacy is something we take seriously.

Mark Zuckerburg knows about a billion people that disagree with that statement.

We're not Mark Zuckerberg, We're not 1 billion people neither, We don't earn money by selling users :)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks Sacha ;)

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

Thanks for the heads up, will be fixed quickly

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

it is repeated many times in the "technical preview"

Waiting for the private beta to start.

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