OpenSocial Developer Interview: Charles Ying from Pixverse
April 29th, 2008 | Published in Google OpenSocial
In march hi5 and MySpace deployed OpenSocial to all their users and OpenSocial started to gain some real traction with developers. Here is a video interview with Charles Ying from PixVerse from March 15th at the hi5 bi-national hackathon in Mountain View. Charles talks about PixWall, an example application they built to demonstrate the power of their Flash Physics engine. Since we did this interview last month, PixWall has seen significant growth and they have been adding servers to meet the demand. They also translated it into Portuguese and Spanish using the OpenSocial Internationalization extensions, with some help from fellow OpenSocial developers and hi5.
Charles Ying, PixVerse
A few excerpts:
What is PixVerse
"PixVerse is a next generation virtual world company"
About the OpenSocial API
"What is interesting about OpenSocial, lot of fun things, we're javascript folks so it was easy. If you are a FaceBook developer it is a different philosophy but it is possible to do. Once you've run on OpenSocial it runs on all networks. Cross platform UI design is important to consider."
About PixWall
"PixWall is an experiment with our engine, a real time bulletin board in 2D, post notes on a bulletin board in real time, if anyone else is looking at your board at the same time you can interact in real time. We have many more to come which I cannot talk about."
Technology used
"PixWall uses a Flash client with a built in 2D physics engine, 50k of Flash, data driven, all ui driven by backend servers. Servers are lock-free concurrent engines, we built a smaller language on the client side for the game logic. We have our own servers, everything is virtual, we use Amazon S3 for storage, the new YouTube Atom API, MySpace TV, Photobucket, integrate all these web services. Our servers are all written in Python, completely asynchronous backend server, very scalable, 12k users, hit 1% load on one machine. Designed to scale horizontally."
Fun story
"Guys at hi5 wanted to demo PixWall at GSP conference in San Diego, Orkut guys as well (that was me:-). Porting to orkut: 10 minutes to get an account, 50 minutes to port from hi5 to orkut. Next week myspace hackathon, port hi5 to myspace, took 90 minutes, more ui. It is a testament to how good the platform is."
And here is a video of Charles's demonstration of PixWall at the end of the hackathon.