Hi5 OpenSocial Hackathon: Interview Charles Ying, Pixverse

At the Hi5 OpenSocial hackathon I interviewed Charles Ying from PixVerse.
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 out 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."

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• opensocial
• apis
• google
• social
• software
• socialsoft
• hi5
• orkut
• pixverse
• pixwall
• myspace