Tag: distributed

Your Tent, My Tent

Sziget 2008: Tent Interior

Tent.is just launched yesterday… Unlike twitter, its a distributed service which means you can run your own or jump on someone else’s. Its not just Microblogging either, its more than just that.

Tent.is is a Tent host. Tent is a protocol for distributed communications. Tent can be used as a personal data vault, a single sign on service, and/or a distributed social network. Anyone can host their own Tent server and/or write Tent apps. In addition to Tent hosting, Tent.is provides a few basic apps to help users get started, a server admin app, and a microblogging app. This was literally the simplest app we could write for Tent. We started with microblogging because we were personally frustrated with the centralized options in the industry. The next set of apps will take Tent much further beyond Twitter-style functionality. Since developers can define new post and profile types, Tent could be used for file backups, video chats, controlling robots, and probably teleporters. Think of Tent as a way to store any kind of information forever, that you control. You might choose to share some of it with friends or colleagues in real time or long after you created it. Most importantly, Tent is yours.

Ade Oshineye has been posting some interesting things about distrubuted microblogging along with myself.

Of course I’m giving Tent a whirl although I’m just connected to the main tent.is server right now. Be keeping an eye on this one in the near future… Be great to see what new service pop up on peoples tent servers.

Is federated microblogging this easy?

everything you need for decentralised Twitter?

I’m wondering if I should bite the bullet and install these alpha and beta plugins under Cubicgarden.com? In my mind it seems what you need for a federated/distributed blogging system is just a few plugins away?

OStatus for WordPress turns your blog into a federated social network. This means you can share and talk to everyone using the OStatus protocol, including users of Status.net/Identi.ca and WordPress.com

WhisperFollow turns your wordpress blog into a federated social web client.
In it’s current form it aggregates RSS feeds in a page on your blog called “following” which it creates.
The links it aggregates are the ones from your blogroll with rss feed data.

And many more…

These would be a good time to have a duplicate setup of cubicgarden.com to test these and many more plug-ins out on..

The end of open twitter?

IMG_2935

Its been a good load of years since I visited a promising startup in South Park, San Francisco called Twitter. Oh have they changed…

There has been a whole number of stories and posts about how Twitter is locking down the API calls and access to data. Not only that they are being very shirty with some of the clients and services around it.

Its ironic we use to praise Twitter for there business model formed around creating a ecosystem around its self by leveraging APIs. It was one of the web 2.0 darlings but something happened…

Twitter right from the start had people asking how were they going to make money to keep going?

Well what ever direction they decided to go in, its meant breaking what made it hugely popular.

The question is what will people move on to? Since Twitter for the longest time have sucked the air out of the microblogging ecosystem and seen off most of the alternatives including Plurk, Pownce, etc…

Jaiku Engine is a opensource project after Google bought it and open sourced it. However it lacks something which status.net and identi.ca had built in from day one. Federation… Jaiku engine has also gone quiet since Google plus launched too. I wonder, what if distributed social networking also come to the rescue and provide a nice mix of social networking like facebook/google+ and federated microblogging?

Twitter has done some great things but frankly the business model they have chosen is rubbing up against too many of my and other peoples freedom. I now wonder if I will ever be able to get a dump of all my tweets, dm’s and mentions? (Dataportability!) Google and Facebook have actually been quite good about this, Twitter much less so.

Distributed Social Networking, one day soon?

WordCamp 2011 Bulgaria

This has to be the ultimate standing in social networking. Distributed social networking is going to happen at some point but in the meanwhile, we all have to put up with these crappy social networks.

I read a few things recently which got me thinking about this again… The main one centres around this read write web piece.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new – but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed’s sale to Facebook, Tr.im’s up and down and Twitter’s denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there’s sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

The one which got me writing is the WordPress.com ability to do real-time blogging…

Jabber (XMPP) is an open instant messaging protocol used by millions of people daily. At WordPress.com we use Jabber to instantly deliver new blog posts and comments to subscribers.

It for me is very intriguing… Its a lot more like how Jaiku use to be (I actually wonder what happened to jaiku engine?). The WordPress ability is nice but if they bring the same idea to self hosted wordpress blogs too, now that would be amazing…

Diso the project all about this went quiet back in 2010 it seems, which is a shame.

I fear Matt Mullenweg the great guy that he is, may not be able to provide the ultimate standing. The im.wordpress relies on wordpress.com too much for my liking. It would be great if there was a way to do most of the piping through other distributed means. I’d also love to see the ability to post comments/feedback through im? And why not? You got the persons details, and you can subscribe to the comments, why not replies?

Matt had to said recently in GigaOM

The Internet needs a strong, independent platform for those of us who don’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s domain. I like to think that if we didn’t create WordPress something else that looks a lot like it would exist. I think Open Source is kind of like our Bill of Rights. It’s our Constitution. If we’re not true to that, nothing else matters.

The independent web is growing quite a bit. Although we have these great cloud servers for WordPress, the software that people run and install themselves is still as popular as ever. Our services are bringing more people online, but they’re also bringing more people who want to own their own space on the web–they want to own a house instead of rent an apartment. When we were first starting out, I thought, “Downloading and uploading software, managing databases, no one wants to do that.” But it turns out, a lot of people do.

Lets hope he follows through on that thinking…

Dabbler, at last someones adding distributed to the mix

Dabble beta

At long last dabble has added distributed back into the mix. Dabble can be thought of yet another video hosting service but actually you would be overlooking its main feature. Its more like del.icio.us than anything else. Simply put its a bookmarking service for online video. So no matter where your video sits, google video, archive.org, youtube or even on your own site, you can bookmark it and share it with anyone via dabbler.

In the usual style you can also add tags and create playlists for other people and friends. Its such a simple idea and although dabble is very rough around the edges, I can see myself using this a lot. I actually rememeber this type of service being applied to Podcasts but it was so simple and clever, it actually is a shame it doesn't do audio too.

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