With social networks proliferating, businesses seeking to build communities would love to tap into existing behemoths like Facebook to get the best of both worlds: leverage personal identity from existing social networks, while building more focused presences on their own sites. Ringside Networks, founded by some of the same folks behind HP/Bluestone and later JBoss, has unveiled what it terms a “Social Application Server.”

That is, Ringside provides a middle tier so that your organization can build its own social application while leveraging those of popular sites. Until now, you could write Facebook apps, but they would only work inside Facebook. And ditto for MySpace, or any other social site, such as the more professionally-focused LinkedIn. 

For starters, Ringside has built an API to the 16-ton gorilla in the room: Facebook, which has 65 million registered users, including those who have been recruited by friends (like us). Ringside head Bob Bickel quoted to us a few factoids: that Facebook alone has 20,000 apps in its ecosystem, and that the typical Facebook user flips through at least a thousand pages a year.

With Ringside Social Application Server, visitors, customers, or business partners can log into your own social application on your site by hitting a Facebook icon. Ringside’s social appserver then reaches out to call a REST-based web service from Facebook that, in effect, provides a form of single sign-on: it automatically preloads appropriate data from the user’s Facebook profile. It also allows you to run any Facebook application, theoretically with few modifications, on your site, plus of course, anything specific that you have written for your community. Ringside supports the usual bevy of web languages, from Java and .NET to dynamic scripting languages like PHP.

Of course, building communities is nothing new. Chat rooms from the first generation web, plus IM, texting, blog sites, Twitter, Wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies have provided ways for people to connect and exchange. Social networks have blossomed to provide more in-depth slices of reality or intimacy for people to share.

While most of the thunder has been stolen by the 15 – 35 year old demographic, businesses have been looking for ways to better engage their customers and business partners. The dilemma of course is that at this point while Facebook provides the depth, it also tends to be thought of as more of a party room. Meanwhile sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo might be more professionally oriented, but they tend to focus more on resume-oriented profiles.

While Ringside on its own won't fill the gap, it provides an opportunity for businesses to build their own focused communities, and sees the opportunity especially acute in what it terms “passion-centric” businesses. In fact, the idea for it originated from Bickel’s latest venture, a partnership in a South Jersey running shoe store. Bickel and colleagues in the sector were looking for a way to better engage their customers who may want to learn of races, find running partners, gain valuable training tips, exchange war stories, and so on (we can relate, we also run on our nights off).

This week, Ringside is announcing its first beta customers. The first is a consortium of running shops which provides features such as tracking your mileage and comparing notes on specific running gear. They are doing so by tying in with, appropriately enough, the Facebook app Run Voomaxer. The other beta user is Fulcrum Gallery.com, for their “What is Art” application that polls site visitors on new featured works of art.

For now, Ringside’s social appserver is in beta, with general release set for June. While Ringside’s support is limited to Facebook for now, it will add support for emerging Google standards and APIs for sites like LinkedIn later on.

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