"social networking is ultimately a marketing vehicle"
Social networking is quickly becoming a commodity, which makes it a prime target for an open source challenge. With a distributed network, a single site with under 10 users can operate within a larger network, which overcomes the network effect that centralized social networks require.
You're right, now it ends in 3 days.
Most definitely. There was a Federated Social Web Summit in Portland in July, 2010, and more on the way. There's a federated social web mailing list, and now the beginnings of a W3C working group that many of us will be working together on. I can't say for sure how it will shake out in the end, because we're all taking different approaches to see which one sticks, but I can guarantee you that a common protocol is part of the process.
Appleseed, on that note, is built to be somewhat protocol agnostic, so we can support upcoming protocols, as well as multiple protocols simultaneously.
Appleseed is open source, distributed social networking, built on a commodity stack, and installs in a few minutes on any LAMP compatible host.
Code is available here:
http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed
Appleseed has a main beta site, appleseedproject.org, and approx. 150 test nodes out in the wild. If you'd like an invite, just email invite@appleseedproject.org. It's still in beta, but new features are added regularly.
We've also been fundraising, if you'd like to donate, our fundraising ends in only 4 days, but every little bit counts:
http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking
Here is our roadmap for the future:
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/
Diaspora is also available, here is their github. They are running on Ruby + Rails, and they were MongoDB based, but recently switched to MySQL.
Yeah, but it is perfectly fine precedent for WikiLeaks to judge that they aren't putting anyone at risk.
Less than 1% of the cables have been released. Wikileaks is working with around a dozen news services from around the world to sift through the data. Wikileaks gave The Pentagon the option to redact sensitive information, and they refused.
There has not been a full dump of the 250,000 cables, they have been slowly releasing them alongside the news agencies they're working with (New York Times, The Guardian, etc). What we've seen so far is only a small fraction of the cables.
The idea that Wikileaks has been indiscriminate with releasing the cables is simply not true.
U.S. federal government documents are not covered under copyright, so when you're talking about "ownership", there's no legal basis for this argument. Those documents, now leaked, are in the public domain. Wikileaks "owns" them just as much as anyone else.
Also, this part:
Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.
Is a really dangerous precedent for Amazon to set for themselves. If you're going to cancel members accounts based on not just the potential danger of known information held within, but on the possibility that information not yet discovered could potentially put someone in danger, that's making a decision based on an extraordinary amount of hypotheticals.
Does this mean that directors actually have to focus instead on character development, plot, and pacing?
I want to be able to read my RPGs like a book sometimes.
All I've ever wanted was the option to keep the voice acting in Japanese, with English subtitles. It would go a long way to making modern RPG's more enjoyable, since I don't speak Japanese, and can't accurately gauge whether Japanese voice actors are as terrible as I'm sure they are.
Well, that was very helpful, and thank you for your enlightened and useful response!
But can someone explain to me why IPv6 didn't just extend the IPv4 format logically and stylistically? Why not just tack on more numbers? And all existing numbers could be assumed
For instance,
209.85.225.147
becomes
1.1.209.85.225.147
Instead, we break convention to use colons and hex, ie. 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf
It seems to me adoption could have been a lot quicker and less painless.
That was in May. Since then I've put out six revisions.
The thing is, although there was seemingly a stop in development (since 2008/2009, actually), I had never given up on the project. I had a notebook with all the ideas, sketches, mockups, etc. where I wanted to take the project. When Diaspora hit, I emailed them, offering to help. I never heard back, so I decided to push forward on Appleseed.
The pace may seem extraordinary considering I'm essentially the sole full time developer, with most help having come from designers and testers, and I handle a full time job on the side, while I do put in a lot of hours, things have moved along so quickly because I had gamed and spec'd out so much in the year prior.
Check out our roadmap, you'll see exactly where we're going.
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/
You can also send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org for an invite to the beta test site. Here's a screenshot for people who don't want to bother signing up (apologies for FB hosting. we're working on that
Michael Chisari
Lead Developer, The Appleseed Project
Unfortunately, coffeehouses in the U.S. aren't particularly social places.
This is basically a model of public intellectualism, and popular education. It has three components: 1. Creating a culture of learning which is not dependent on structure, but which is interwoven into life's fabric. 2. Pushing access to information to everyone, with no prejudices about who it will benefit best or who should be prioritized. 3. Encouraging a culture of healthy debate, humility, and a collective struggle for answers, instead of an individual struggle for superiority.
We're already seeing this on some level: Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, Amateur Astronomy, Open Courseware, etc. But I think it's not enough to just keep doing what we're doing, I would advocate that we need to go further. There is no reason that, for instance, a university doing research, no matter how obscure, should not be pressured to put their work online in an accessible fashion. Videos of conferences and presentations, notes, theses, etc. Beyond that, we need to actively break down prejudices about who benefits from this information. We cannot claim to know how people will use information, and determining the importance of their access based on condition, geography, poverty, gender, etc. should not be tolerated. Someone who does studies alternative energies should not dismiss the notion that a teenager living in Nigeria might not want to pour over everything they know, either in order to use that knowledge to create a DIY solar or wind generator, or to create something they hadn't even considered. We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
This is something I feel very strongly about, that the delineation between the academic and the non-academic, the intellectual and the non-intellectual, must be broken down and done away with. Here, then, is an RSA animate which talks about the structure of the current education system, and touches on the stratification within it.
Don't panic.
