So, when you decide to abandon facebook and start making your own social network, where do you begin? To me it was quickly obvious that the open-source Diaspora project was the place to start. It's fairly well on it's way, has links into several other social tools such as facebook, twitter, and tumblr, and has nice features well suited to some of the goals of our project like the ability to subscribe to hashtags. Oh, and, yes, I'm being intentionally cryptic about what our project is. As soon as we launch I'll be willing to talk more about that. Anyway...
Finding development space was a different challenge. Until recently I've always managed my own ISP provision, but that has changed so I don't have the ability to set up my own development server, punch a few holes in the firewall, and do whatever I please. In hindsight I'm glad of this because it allowed me to discover the Amazon AWS free usage tier. A free micro instance of several server images (including Windows Server 2008) along with elastic IPs, plenty of storage for snapshots and backups, server monitoring and alerts, and lots of other great features. How did I miss this? Within minutes of signing up for the service I was building a new Ubuntu server and walking through the Diaspora setup. But, if you thought that was going to be as easy, you should go check out my rant about open source software a few posts ago...
Okay, I need to get back to the countdown. More to come.
When social networking breaks
I have a dear friend who is very active in a particular social cause, and she has a problem. She, and the others who are busy working and advocating have become very dependent on facebook to get news, updates, information, and messages to the rest of their network. They're a very passionate group and they cross-post and tag each other like crazy. And facebook keeps banning them as spammers. Never mind that they are all friends, that they only tag and post to friends, that they are trying to do important work.
In several ways this points to the profound impact that social networking has changed the landscape for so many people. As Jeff Jarvis noted on TWiT.tv's Triangulation (show #28), we all crave social interaction, and the explosion of topical social networking demonstrates the power of easily connecting with people who share our passions but who we might never have met in meatspace. But what do you do when the very social network that you need (and that you are supporting through their ability to aggregate and sell information about your passions and needs) arbitrarily decides that they don't really want you, or at least that particular part of you?
Perhaps you go out and start your own social network dedicated to the cause you support?
Yes, I think that's exactly what you do. Watch this space, and I'll share the steps along the way.
In several ways this points to the profound impact that social networking has changed the landscape for so many people. As Jeff Jarvis noted on TWiT.tv's Triangulation (show #28), we all crave social interaction, and the explosion of topical social networking demonstrates the power of easily connecting with people who share our passions but who we might never have met in meatspace. But what do you do when the very social network that you need (and that you are supporting through their ability to aggregate and sell information about your passions and needs) arbitrarily decides that they don't really want you, or at least that particular part of you?
Perhaps you go out and start your own social network dedicated to the cause you support?
Yes, I think that's exactly what you do. Watch this space, and I'll share the steps along the way.
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