Hello OStatus community! OStatus will be releasing a series of blogs that include interviews with a handfull of professionals talking about their thoughts on OStatus. Our goal is to see who is using OStatus, what they are using it for, and what they like/dislike. Today we will be posting our first OStatus interview and the interviewee is Tuomas Koski.
Tuomas is a 30 year-old Finnish rock'n'roll coder living in Paris. He has been participating in different open source projects and federations over the past six years. Presently, he is working in the private sector, in the energy business and he is starting his own company as well.
Give us an overview of your software. What is it, and what does it do?
Tuomas: Buddycloud is a location based microblogging service. Buddycloud is mainly about two things: user generated channels and places.
A channel is somewhere between a Twitter posts and IRC conversation. A user starts a topic (a thread) in a channel and people can add comments to it.
Buddycloud at the moment has two kind of channels, user channels and topic channels. Each user has their own user channel where they can express themselves how ever they want. Every user can create other channels as well. We call these kind of channels "topic channel's".
The channels can be even open to anyone or only available for defined users. So these are both like “groups” in activity streams.
We believe in rich and quality content and we also want that content to be in a context. We want to see a system that when I see a comment, for example on a widget on a web page, I can very quickly see the whole context and the full short conversation.
Originally buddycloud was only a mobile application (and still mainly is - the web version is very very alpha release and a huge hack) but because of being a mobile application first has had a strong location and place integration from the start.
We believe in a location system where user can have privacy and - once again - valuable context to it. We don't believe in location as street addresses are "Boulevard Goblin 8, 75013 paris" but locations like "Home", "The Gilt Club" or even places like "Sleeping".
We believe that user being placed to a place should be automatic, no "check-ins or check-outs". Because of this, in buddycloud, the user "bookmarks" a place only once. and when she arrives there the next time she will be placed there automatically.
Users can of course choose if their location is public or is displayed only to the trusted people. Location and places are calculated from wifi spots and cell towers. Of course GPS is supported to.
Why did you decide to implement social web federation
Tuomas: Social networks are really not networks if they do not network together. I believe that microblogging is like email service. Everyone should be able to host their own system if they want or need. People/organizations should have full control of their data and users and accounts. People should be able to control what is shown. There's no profiling, no marketing no terms changing. And so on.
Why did you choose OStatus?
Tuomas: It's a great team of enthusiastic people. OStatus is trying to create protocol where every user can control their "stuff" as they want. Possiblity of user being able to take their data and switch to another service is also great and I support it truly.
What parts of the OStatus suite have you implemented?
Tuomas: All. Buddycloud is close to be fully OStatus compliant in production. In theory we are. We had all Activity Streams, pubsubhubbub, Salmon, Webfinger implemented but it was a bit against our "business logic" so at the moment we have only pubsubhubbub and activity streams enabled in “production”.
So why havent' we put all OStatus stuff out yet? Why is it greating some problems? The core of buddycloud is XMPP based. And the all the “business logic” our application has that were build upon the possibilities of XMPP. We are working to change our logic to support all OStatus use cases.
Since buddycloud is already in "production" and takes more time to change, I have started another project "MiniMe - the Minimalistic Personal Microbloggin Service" with my friend Julien Da Silva. It's fully OStatus compliant microblogging service. The idea behind it is to have example implementation of all OStatus protocols. Also the idea is that it's super simple to install: just copy/paste. How ever the easy install part is not reality yet.
What problems did you have
Tuomas: No problems really. Biggest problem is to have multiple different implementations to test against. Also to understand all differences of every implementations business logic takes time since it's not visible. With this i mean that for example different services are using for different things.
How can users try out OStatus in your software
Tuomas: More about MiniMe can be read here: http://code.google.com/p/minime-microblogger/ I will be heavily updating the project page the coming days. Buddycloud can be found here: http://buddycloud.com/ or just start following me in your status.net installation using URI http://buddycloud.com/user/xmpp.lobstermonster.org/tuomas
- Tuomas
