Userplane - It's an Application Service Provider for Social Networking Websites

I've been looking at Userplane to see how I can take advantage of the functionality offered. To me, at least two elements are needed to answer my question:

• An understanding of the Userplane offering from a functional and/or business case standpoint,
• An understanding of the situations and for whom the functionality is a good choice.

The first bullet point is the easier one to deal with, so I'm starting my look at Userplane from the taxonomy point of view.

The harder one, understanding for whom and the use cases that make the most sense for Userplane is going to take more work, IMHO. To really understand where Userplane makes sense, we also need to understand the alternatives to Userplane. I can say, my initial research suggest there are parts of the Userplane offering, specifically desktop, where I believe the offering is very compelling as I haven't seen any comparable offerings, open source or otherwise.

The core of the Userplane offering is a group of communication widgets for social networking based sites. Userplane doesn't offer the whole software kit needed for such a site. Instead, they offer hosted applications to enhance such a site. There's a key point here, which I'll say again, hosted applications.

Say you a have a nice community website up and running. Folks are posting, lots of commenting activity, good traffic, etc. You'd like to make the site stickier and more interactive. With a modest amount of integration work, you can have widgets such as chat, text/voice/video instant messaging, and user video uploading without the work and expense of hosting the applications yourself.

Sounds nice, eh? So, who plays for all of these nice features? Userplane has two models. The first model is that you just pay for the widgets on an usage basis. The second model, Userplane money, is a revenue sharing model. Userplane provides the advertisers and pushes ads to your users via the widgets and shares the click-through revenue with you.

So, here's my main insight so far: Userplane is an Application Service Provider (ASP) for social networking sites. To me, this categorization is helpful for evaluating the best use of Userplane. ASPs have been around for a while and criteria for evaluating their suitability for a particular application are available.

That's the main thread I'll be following in this blog, figuring out where the sweet spot is for using Userplane. I also want to look at Userplane from the prospective of a component, or widget, developer. Also, I want to do some hands on work and show some integration examples. Stay tuned...