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.
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