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Hull.io, an open platform for social apps

by romain_dardour on 12/11/12, 2:25 PM with 47 comments

• by d0m on 12/11/12, 3:13 PM

  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.

• by afandian on 12/11/12, 3:46 PM

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

• by rickcecil on 12/12/12, 3:20 AM

  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?

• by RossM on 12/11/12, 3:53 PM

  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.

• by tchock23 on 12/11/12, 3:45 PM

  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...

• by anujkk on 12/11/12, 4:48 PM

  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".

• by cbsmith on 12/11/12, 5:13 PM

  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.

• by TheMakeA on 12/12/12, 2:52 AM

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

• by melvinmt on 12/11/12, 3:37 PM

  > 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.

• by svetlyak40wt on 12/11/12, 4:50 PM

  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?

• by pbnjay on 12/11/12, 5:58 PM

  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.

• by eduardordm on 12/11/12, 3:07 PM

  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.

• by demosquared on 12/11/12, 3:50 PM

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

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

• by oboizt on 12/11/12, 9:13 PM

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

• by mxuribe on 12/11/12, 4:56 PM

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

• by TallboyOne on 12/11/12, 7:29 PM

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

• by sgdesign on 12/11/12, 3:07 PM

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

• by marmaduke on 12/11/12, 2:51 PM

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

• by DjebbZ on 12/11/12, 3:13 PM

  Waiting for the private beta to start.