Alan’s Kiloblog

Synapse is peer-to-peer micro-sharing.

It is a micro-sharing network, an network where users share short messages, measured in characters, not words, with other users.

Rather than sending messages to a group, a person publishes there message, other people subscribe to those messages. As you subscribe to other users, you begin to see them appear in a stream, a reverse chronological display, with the most recent message from any of the people you follow at top.

Additionally, people can track topics through a real time search of all messages posted by anybody. They can search based on search terms, the sender, people mentioned in the message, and the components of any shared URLs.

I use Twitter. I’ve get notifications from my FriendFeed account. I have an account with Pownce and identi.ca. Micro-sharing web sites are springing up like mushrooms, especially in the enterprise arena, especially in the enterprise arena, where the problems of revenue model and scalability are closer to being solved.

Synapse is a peer-to-peer micro-sharing network. It does not require a web server. People will run a client on their computer. The computer will participate in a distributed database of everyone’s tweets. As people begin to follow each other, and follow each other back, their Synapse instances will connect and share resources, forming a database.

Synapse builds on the implied trust network and makes it explicit; resources are shared based on trust that is enforced by public/private key encryption.

Synapse will give anyone who has the desire to launch a micro-sharing network, in their organization, or open to all comers on the Internet, simply by starting up Synapse on their personal computer, creating a network, and inviting people to join.

Curating my bookmarks on git and GitHub at http://delicious.com/alan/git. I have not culled them as of this writing, so it looks like any old bookmark dump from a few minutes of Google. However,  it will ultimately only include the useful bookmarks. The ones I learned from. The comment will tell you what I learned. It comes out looking like http://delicious.com/alan/javascript+template.

Andrew Turner came to town this week. I spoke with him about my peer-to-peer micro-sharing project, among other things.

I asked him what open source license he favored. He said BSD. His was the GPL restricts usage take on GPL. GPL supporters might disagree, or rather, argue that if it is not GPL, the source is not truly open.

I am familiar with the different open source licenses and what they mean. I am familiar with the politics behind GPL and Apache, both are licenses that attempt to exchange a license for a behavior. Apache 2.0 seeks indemnity from patent litigation. GPL seeks indemnity from patent litigation and seeks to perpetuate source distribution.

Thus, I waver between Apache 2.0 and MIT. BSD used to have an advertising clause, saying you must give credit to the author, but that has been dropped, since the advertising clause created a snowball of credits.

I’m not concerned about enforcing billing in credits, however.

Ed Vielmetti says via Twitter “best open source license is the Berkeley license ’share, enjoy, give us credit’ propagates your name best w/fewest entanglements.” Not sure if Andrew and Ed know that the “give us credit” bit has been removed, making the BSD license appear indistinguishable from the MIT license.

If I where not going to choose the MIT license, it is because someone stepped in and asked me to attach the Apache 2.0 license to further the cursade against software patents, and did so without boring me to tears.

SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people. It is a very git-oriented world view. A world of programmers forking, hacking and experimenting. There is merging, but only if people agree to do so, by other channels.

This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer.

I love the pivot.

GitHub gives me my own place to play. It lets me share my code the way I share photos on Flickr, the same way I share bookmarks on del.icio.us. Here’s something I found useful, for what it’s worth.

Naming a project is simple. I can give my project a name of my choosing. It is not a tedious affair akin to choosing a domain name, a dozen little stabs of disappointment, to land upon some hyphenated moniker.

Best of all, I’m not told that, before I start my project, I should go look for a similar project to join, before I set out on my own. I’ve always loathed this particular bit of pedantry.

I’ve got an idea, I’d like to try it out. As I work on it, I’d like to share it, to see if anyone is interested. I’d like to offer it to you, for what it’s worth.

Moreover, I’m sharing my code, for what it’s worth to me to share my code.

I am sharing my code. I am not launching an open source project. I am not beginning a search for like minded developers to avoid duplication of efforts. I am not showing up at someone else’s door hat in hand, asking for commit access. I am not looking to do battle with Brook’s Law at the outset of my brainstorm.

GitHub is code sharing with out the obligition of politicking born of centralized repository access.

Amazing that I still use Mail.app, even when it loses email.

I am considering moving the WordPress blog on ThinkNOLA so that it is the landing page and changing the URL structure. This is to create smaller URLs that are easier to cut and paste into email.

What has kept me from putting WordPress as the base is that I always imagined a different application there. An application that still exists primarily in my imagination. I’ll let that go. When the time comes, I can incorporate the existing URL structure into the new application. This is aligns with the attitude that content and archival is important, and that new code should respect the cumulative efforts of the user base.

Now, I am concerned that redirections will suck out some of my Google Juice, especially on the few articles that are rock stars in my mind. Articles about AmericaSpeaks are slipping anyway.

Ryan Vis said something about how by virtue of being a redirection, the landing page for ThinkNOLA.com is invisible to search engines.

Is is best to rework ThinkNOLA to accommodate the usage patterns of New Orleanians. They need URLs that won’t break in email. I don’t like using tinyurl.com with it’s mystery meat URLs. That can’t do much for my Google ranking.

People will copy and paste URLs into other forums, and if they don’t break, then incoming links to ThinkNOLA.com will increase.

Switched TheBayouBoogaloo.com to a simple structure.

Used to do the long structure like http://kiloblog.com/2007/04/23/why-I-like-to-put-mustard-on-blueberry-pancakes, but who cares when I posted, really? It makes the URLs long and makes finding something via auto-complete in the browser pointless. I’m probably not going to write about my tangy, sweet breakfast taste sensation more than once. Certainly, I would not have to explain myself more than once.

My new structure is http://TheBayouBoogaloo.com/post/volunteer-2007. Because I’m able to edit the post slug, I choose one that would not be long, and not collide with a call for volunteers in 2008.