FSF developing social networking software
By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 15 July 2010 10:37
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At the core of GNU social is a piece that Lee likes to call the relationship manager. "This handles all your social connections, and lets you set how you want privacy and your relationships with others to be handled by default. For example, a celebrity may wish to set their GNU social set-up to accept friend requests from everyone, but show them very little in exchange. Being able to easily and efficiently deal with different people - from fans, to family and all that's between in a clear, privacy-minded way is key.
"We're also hoping to create some fun games, add private messaging (kind of like Facebook's 'Inbox' feature, but decentralised) and eventually open things up to allow people to very quickly plug GNU social into their existing applications via a kind of 'social bridge'," Lee says.
He is looking forward to using GNU social in order to keep up with his own family. "Since leaving Facebook, I've gained a couple new baby cousins and some friends have recently gotten married - I've missed out a little as a result of being Facebookless, if you will."
While GNU social is yet to be formally released, Lee says it is usable. "A lot of the good stuff is already done, thanks in no small part to the work of Evan Prodromou and the StatusNet developers. I met Craig Andrews who is a StatusNet developer through some local FSF events, and he expressed interest in getting involved with GNU social, so we have his contributions to StatusNet as our official 'stake' in StatusNet as it were."
StatusNet is an open source microblogging application.
"In addition to Craig and StatusNet, we are blessed to have some great young developers from Clark University - Sean Corbett and Ian Denhardt - who are working on GNU social and getting paid over the summer," Lee says.
"Additionally, there's myself and Rob Myers, and Steven DuBois from the GNU Generation project. Rob and Steve are focusing on the user experience, Sean and Ian working closely with StatusNet and Craig, leaving me to help steer everyone in the right direction, though I expect to dip in a little with the code and design parts too. We're also delighted to have Will Kahn-Greene from Miro and Dan Brickley from the World Wide Web Consortium on-board as contributors."
