zembly

zembly is the place to create social applications, together

At zembly, you easily create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web. And, you do it along with other people.

Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.

In some ways, you can think of zembly like Wikipedia for social applications—a wiki for live, editable code that is more than just about trivial widgets, but rather about full-fledged social applications that can tap into the social graph and reach millions of users.

At zembly, you can easily and instantly...

• author social applications using your browser
• participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code
• use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications
• publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

create social applications with just your browser and your creativity

At zembly, you build social applications for Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, the iPhone, and more, using just your browser and your creativity. Create and deploy a working applications in just seconds.

how does zembly work?

Applications consist of widgets, which are reusable pieces of user interface, and services, which are reusable server-side logic that ties everything together. Using just these two concepts, you can create social applications that run in Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial containers like MySpace and hi5, on the iPhone, and in the browser.

To create widgets and services, you don't need to be a software engineer, but you do need to know some basic scripting with JavaScript and HTML. Why code? Compared to drag-and-drop tools for configuring simple widgets, RSS feeds, or blocks—code (and at zembly, very simple code) is the only way to build truly meaningful social applications that take advantage of social graph and other data in rich, exciting ways.

And we've made it really easy. Widgets and services are focused on specific tasks, and are comprised of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML (and in the case of Facebook, FBML), which are languages you probably already know (and we have more language support coming soon).

You code right at zembly using our IDE-class editor running in your browser. There is nothing to download and nothing to deploy—nothing to get in your way of creating your next social app.

To make creating your social applications as easy as possible, the advanced zembly editor has code completion, auto-formatting, full syntax highlighting for JavaScript, XML, CSS, HTML, and even FBML, plus an innovative editing history that lets you jump back and forth between changes with one click, without ever losing a change.

the web is your palette

At zembly, you don't have to create everything yourself. The whole point of zembly is to reuse and combine not just what other people at zembly create, but to rely on the APIs and data from anywhere on the web. And it's easy, usually just one line of code.

For example, using our partner, Dapper, you can turn any web page on the Internet into data that you can use in your application. Simply search for what you want from within zembly's Find & Use palette:

Results from Dapper and other leading web API providers like Amazon, Flickr, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo appear alongside remixable pieces and parts from other zembly users. Just click to add the line of code that lets you call that provider from your application. The web is your palette.

web API providers

If you are a provider of a web API, we'd love to integrate access to your services into zembly for everyone to use. It's a simple process; just gives us a shout at partners@zembly.com and we'll be happy to work with you. Some of the providers that are already integrated into zembly:

and many more...

create the web together - it's what makes zembly special

Why do it all alone? The applications you create, the people you connect to, and the ecosystem that grows around your work—zembly only gets better the more people use it. Create the social web, using the social web.

your profile

At zembly, you have your own profile that you can customize, and which others can see and connect to. You can see what people have been doing by watching their dynamic activity timeline.

your work

You also have your own collection of items that you've created, including applications, widgets, and services. Other people can see what you own, and what you've been working on recently.

your contacts

Your list of contacts lets you easily connect with other people and reuse the pieces they create and which you want to use. If a contact creates a useful service, simply drag-and-drop his service into your code to call it. And she can do the same for the things you create.

sharing your work with friends

In addition to your profile name, you define a codename, which is the way other people can reference and reuse the things you create directly from their code. You literally become a part of the things that other people create.

what the world is saying

You can rate the things that other people create, and they can rate yours. Ratings make finding useful or interesting things easier, and as an author, let you know what people think about what you're doing.

free, scalable hosting for your social applications

The applications you create are hosted at zembly for free*. In fact, there is no real difference between creating an application and hosting it at zembly, since whatever you do happens entirely through the browser and we take care of the details of publishing your application to social platforms like Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, and others.

All you do is hit the publish button when your application is ready to go live. We want you to spend your time thinking about reaching a million users, not worrying about the million details of running a datacenter to support them.

technology

Yes, zembly scales. Zembly is part of Sun Microsystems, and is built from the ground up on Sun's industry-leading stack of enterprise hardware and software, including Solaris, Java, Glassfish, and MySQL, and running on Network.com's next-generation cloud-computing platform.

When you create an application at zembly, your application will transparently scale across our highly scalable infrastructure stack, without giving you the headache of having to make it all work.

* (ok, so you noticed the asterisk...)

Our goal during this beta is to help you build cool stuff at zembly and then listen to what you think—it's that simple. We want you to build viral applications with millions of users, feel free to put ads in them and buy a new car with the proceeds, or simply play around and make something cool for yourself and your friends. Furthermore, zembly is all about doing this collaboratively with all the other users to develop a rich set of live, reusable content that we all can use to build ever more interesting applications.

To put it bluntly, we're not going to charge you anything during our beta period, and we have post-beta plans that will let you create at zembly without ever being charged. Of course, we also have to pay those power bills at the end of the month like everyone else, so we'll be introducing options where we charge you a little bit, and you get a whole lot in return. As our plans get more concrete over the next few months, we'll be making more information available on our blog. Until then, it's free*. :)

zembly is in private beta

If you're interested in joining in the fun, please sign up for the beta using the button below.

If you'd like more information about zembly, including contact info, links to articles, and images, please head over to our about page.