Guaka! - social networks

Post to multiple social networks with this great ping.fm alternative

Guaka — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:18:34 +0000

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I only met Callum briefly in Melbourne in 2007, right after I stopped volunteering for couchsurfing, right before he started volunteering for couchsurfing. A brief encounter with Callum was enough to know you're dealing with someone very smart and special. Later we started opencouchsurfing.org and regularly communicated online. I was happy to meet him again last summer in 2012. He wanted to start a new project and we brainstormed a bit about this. We were both avid users of ping.fm. I think Callum actually got me onto ping.fm at some point in 2007 or so.

Ping.fm: post to 20-something networks at once

Ping.fm was pretty good. There were some minor annoyances but overall it was a great way to post once and spread your message to tons of different networks. Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, but also Identi.ca, Plurk and many other fantasy named sites not used by many. But for an Identi.ca fan it was a great way to update your status on more than just identica. (For the uninitiated, Identica is an open source, slightly decentralized alternative to twitter.)

Then some day Seesmic, the slightly bigger social networking company with a nice looking product, took over Ping.fm. And quickly thereafter slashed the main feature that made Ping.fm stand out from the crowd. Since then there was no easy way for me anymore to post to Identi.ca, Twitter and FB at the same time.

Thus I was very happy Callum decided to build an alternative for ping.fm: Composer.io.

Composer.io: Post to multiple social networks

Now, half a year later Composer.io has become quite usable and you can post on multiple social networks simultaneously. It's actually a bit smarter than ping.fm as it will already allow you to post longer posts that will be automatically shortened for platforms like Twitter that only allow 140 characters.

Why post to more networks at once?

Personally, I have a bunch of followers of my twitter, quite a few friends on facebook. Identi.ca is not that active but unlike on twitter the links are dofollow links, so for seo I prefer to put links to projects I want to support with google juice on my identi.ca, but for social networking reasons twitter and facebook are much better. Like this I get the best of both.

Composer.io is a work in progress and your input is very welcome!

Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years

Guaka — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 01:22:59 +0000

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It always makes me happy to hear from Joe. He wrote something new: How mobile phones can replace a broken economy: The Mobile Manifesto:

When we talk about trouble with the economy, we’ve been overlooking an astounding opportunity. Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years. If you care about the planet, if you care about your kids, if you care about other people, this is something to pay attention to.

While we continue to argue about capitalism and socialism, for the first time a third option is really possible. We can build a more sophisticated, dynamic, distributed approach to organizing labor and resources than has ever been attempted before.

It's bold and sensible. It has made sense for the past couple of years, when it became clear to me that the deeper ideas behind the sharing of free software and free information are applicable to the real world, the real economy. It was no wonder I met Joe 2 years ago at the CouchSurfing Collective in New Zealand; it was amazing experience to work with him. His analysis of modern life is razor sharp and combined with his desire for change we could start seeing "actual people, in vicinity to one another, thinking about each others’ needs, and helping each other, in person and on the ground".

Unlike existing networks based on short messaging (twitter, broadtexter, brightkite, etc), Groundcrew focuses on finding and coordinating like-minded strangers rather than friends. Groups form based on common beliefs, needs, and interests. Broad groups exist for those interested in good deeds, adventures, exchanges, and more. Another differentiating factor is that Groundcrew aggregates information about members’ immediate availability for action, together with agents’ passions and dreams. This is opposed to other services (twitter, facebook) which work more generally with status updates and feeds.

Trash and Cash

Guaka — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:04:08 +0000

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In the past 2 weeks I've set up two new wikis. Trashwiki is a wiki about dumpster diving and anything else that's related to trash. There's already a tiny community, and I guess we'll soon have 100 articles. We did copy some stuff from Wikipedia to get started, but do feel free to remove the dry encyclopedic stuff. After that I decided I needed some money. Or cash. So Cashwiki is a wiki about money. So far it's just me, and I copied a lot of GFDL and public domain stuff from other places. All this got me to playing with OpenID on MediaWiki, which I also set up on my favorite hitchhiking website.

1000 articles in Hitchwiki!

Guaka — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:40:58 +0000

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Today we reached the milestone of 1000 articles at Hitchwiki.org! It took less than 3 years to get there. Already before I found the then called "Hitchhiker's guide to Hitchhiking" I was sure that a wiki for hitchhikers was a good idea. So I'm very happy that I moved the project to Wikia.com in December 2005. At some point I had been thinking to move it to hitchhikers.couchsurfing.com, but fortunately MrTweek was around. He did an excellent job setting up and maintaining the current Hitchwiki.org and adding the extremely cool integrated maps. All in all the project has become a prime source of current hitchhiking info, and a lightning rod for online social cooperation - in three years' time we never felt the need to set up even a single rule. Next...

Last week I contacted Salman of digihitch.com and we can probably show a nicely integrated Hitchwiki on there!
More syndication, especially maps.hitchwiki.org to other places and vice versa
More info in other languages besides English
Most important: continue the do-ocratic conviviality!

Last.fm social music revolution

Guaka — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:59:39 +0000

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I signed up at Last.fm in 2005. I never really used it a lot. Until recently, when I got slightly bored by soma.fm (still great though!). I found out Last.fm is streaming tons of music. A bit like pandora.com, but way better. And it seems they have everything, ranging from Aphex Twin, to the Beatles, your local punk band, Ravi Shankar, Stockhausen, anything. It can give you recommendations, or you listen to a tag radio (try gypsy, 303, amsterdam, whatever). You can click "love" if you like something and "ban" is even more useful. It's especially nice to tune into your friends' radios. Feel free to tune into mine. There's even a client for my Nokia N810. Now we just need free wireless everywhere...

Super Wall super messed up

Guaka — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:32:55 +0000

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Sometimes I get in touch with friends I haven't seen in a long time, but most of the time Facebook is just terribly annoying. There are the vampires and growing gifts, and many more time wasting "applications". I also noticed that more than 50% of the requests come from less than 10% of my "friends". Today I went through the usual "confirm requests" and decided to check out at least the Super Wall (after tons of requests). I clicked through the sign-up process without looking, without selecting anything and no friends at all. Out of gratitude Super Wall decided to send a postcard with "how to get a boyfriend: wear slutty clothes, laugh at his jokes, put out on the first date" in my name, to all my Facebook contacts. Great. ... Not. A partly solution for these annoyances is an optional blocking of applications and requests from certain friends. And I'm not sure how to fix the sheer abuse by the Super Wall application. Is there some kind of member feedback about applications to Facebook?

Working for Hyves in Amsterdam

Guaka — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:18:50 +0000

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Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I've been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member. Most of these members live in the Netherlands; the majority of young people in the Netherlands have a Hyves account and many are actively using it. Officially I will start working for Hyves on the 1st of February. There is a Hyves API (currently beta, mostly in Dutch) and will be implementing OpenSocial and some more very exciting technology. I will have to limit the time I spend on other projects but the contract I signed is quite liberal (e.g. compared to this one for CouchSurfing volunteers). On top of that, Hyves actively participates in the development of Gentoo Linux. This weekend there will be a party in Trento. I'm moving next week, I will attend the first BeWelcome (un)conference in Antwerpen on the 19th and 20th, and I already found some places to live in Amsterdam.

Federating Social Networks in Amsterdam

Guaka — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:13:42 +0000

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Last week Anu wrote me about a workshop in Amsterdam about federating social networks, when I completely did not expect to be in Amsterdam... The workshop was interesting. I didn't attend the entire day but I sensed that it could lead to interesting results. The workshop was the first stage towards a practical framework. A myriad of protocols related to anything social (e.g. XFN, FOAF, hCard, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial) was discussed and the intention was spoken out to have a proof of concept and running code available for the conference on February 9th and 10th (SNES). There's definitely enough momentum. Twitter and Six Apart were present and are actively supporting the effort. Hyves, a Dutch social network that just celebrated their 5 million member party, was mentioned a lot. I have one constructive remark about organizing a workshop: Try to have some wiki space available before the workshop starts. This way you don't depend on people sending you their notes later on, and editing wikis in a social setting can lead to interesting (and blizzardly fast) results. Temporarily use another wiki, or even permanently, if there is an existing wiki which has goals that are similar enough. Of course, first ask permission from the community (if there is one) and try to get them involved in the workshop as well, during and after. I was happy to talk to James Burke again. I recognized some more familiar faces and while brainstorming about a name for the project (and checking out translations into African languages) we found out that we had met at What The Hack, an outside festival for hackers two years ago where I spoke about the Bambara Wikipedia. I'm totally enjoying Amsterdam...

I grabbed RealSocial.org

Guaka — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:11:51 +0000

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Social networks are hot. MySpace, Facebook. Google recently wanted to open the market with its OpenSocial. Which made me think, are these efforts really social? Is Facebook a real social network? I think not So I grabbed realsocial.org which is currently just an alias. But I will put up a wiki with my (and your?) ideas about what real social networks are. I'm thinking of distinguishing Real Social and real social networks. I'd consider CouchSurfing, BookCrossing, and all current ride share websites that I'm aware of, as real social networks. They lead to real life connections or actual forms of exchange, with less time spent offline than online. I could think of three that would fit my criteria for being Real Social: BeWelcome, Ripple and Hitchwiki. The capitalization comes from the way the networks, its organization and the software is developed. JANUARY 2014 UPDATE: Ripple is now a little bit different, I'm not sure if it's still real social. And I've dropped the idea to do much with realsocial.org. SEPTEMBER 2014 UPDATE: I sold the domain name :)

The Wiki Party - closer to reality

Guaka — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:11:52 +0000

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Last year I did a BoF at Wikimania 2006 about The Wiki Party, the idea to start a political party. Today Anu sent me a link to a Facebook group with this same title. I jokingly told people "when I'm 40 years old I will start this party if no one else did before then". Fortunately I won't have to, anymore. Of course, it's happenning in Finland. Olli Sirén was considering to run a campaign to the Helsinki City Council. From the main page of wikiparty.net:

Wikiparty is bringing new ways to do politics. It´s based on the idea of open politics. This site will be the international basis for this new party. The movement has started in Finland and will spread around the world in one form or another. Democracy is grown weak around the world. Voting percentages are in a steady decline. Let's put together a Wikiparty. A party that creates its political opinions in the same way that Wikipedia forms its articles. Let's try to think ways to systematically create political force. This party could vote for its representatives to different political parliaments. These "agents" of Wikiparty would interpret the ideas of Wikiparty to real voting situations and pass the ideas of the community to the parliament. This way we could challenge the traditional parties to a debate between weak and strong democracy. This kind of virtual community that aims to a real life political chance, could reach over national borders and grasp problems caused by for example globalization or climate change.

And yesterday I learned about Kaltura, a social-networky video editing tool, kind-of-a crossbred between wiki, and youtube with the promise to release their software under the GNU General Public license.