buddycloud blog

Presenting at realtimeconf.eu

imaginator — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:40:10 +0200

buddycloud presenting at the Realtime Conference: April 22, 23 2013 Lyon, France

imaginator — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:57:30 +0100

The Realtime conference goes from strength to strength and we’re excited to be invited to present there.

If you build amazing services on the internet you really want to get there.

The conference is a smaller, more intimate gathering of experts and that means that there are limited tickets. To join us, get your’s at http://realtimeconf.eu/

Date check: APRIL 22, 23 2013 LYON, FRANCE

Last week we presented at FOSDEM, under the theme of: Secure,...

imaginator — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:01:50 +0100

Last week we presented at FOSDEM, under the theme of: Secure, Federated Communication. Here’s the video.

The buddycloud FOSDEM release

imaginator — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 23:05:00 +0100

Today, just in time for FOSDEM, we’re announcing version 0.9 of the buddycloud webclient and updates to all the buddycloud components.

And everything is nicely packaged at downloads.buddycloud.com

This release also includes new releases of the

We’re be demoing the new software at FOSDEM and ready to help you setup your own buddycloud instance.

Find us at the Realtime Lounge in FOSDEM (K Building, level 2).

And see you in FOSDEM. Until then this is what we’re doing:

Easily Upload Pictures and Video Into Your buddycloud Channel

imaginator — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:14:00 +0100

From the buddycloud department of extreme-alphaware:

Abmar threw together a quick Android upload intent that will post to your channel. Nothing more, nothing less.

To try it out, check out: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/65800395/buddycloud.apk

I’ll be using it at FOSDEM to keep the pictures flowing.

buddycloud Debian Packages Built Nightly

imaginator — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 20:51:00 +0100

Along with the rapid updates on Github, we have started doing nightly builds of Debian packages for all buddycloud software.

Our goal is to make installing buddycloud as easy as possible. Good packages also mean that updating your buddycloud server is pain-free.

The current packages are designed for Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian Sid.

Packages are generated nightly using the buddycloud build scripts and all packages are downloadable from: downloads.buddycloud.com.

It’s almost as good as bacon rolls covered in butter and swimming in bacon juice.

buddycloud team at FOSDEM

imaginator — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:57:00 +0100

In just over a week some of the world’s best software developers will be attending the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

FOSDEM is the world’s largest open source conference brings together developers from around the world that are working on projects like Postgres, Mozilla, and… buddycloud.

This year buddycloud is part of the Realtime Lounge: We will be presenting and demoing buddycloud.And we’re going further - talking about how buddycloud enables the Personal Cloud OS and changes everything you thought you knew about social network design. The Saturday Presentation in the XMPP room will reveal all!

To install your own buddycloud server and meet some of the smartest minds in distributed social networking, meet us in the Realtime lounge on Saturday and Sunday.

See you in Brussels.

PS: FOSDEM is a busy and chaotic conference: to set up a meeting around the conference of if you can’t find the Realtime Lounge, ping donna.smith@buddycloud.com

PPS: Some of the buddycloud team will also be at the XMPP summit which runs for two days before FOSDEM. We will be running breakout sessions on buddycloud, and the road to standardising buddycloud into a protocol that everyone can build on

PPPS: say hello on our mailing list and in our chat room

PPPPS: of course buddycloud is opensource

Running buddycloud on Firefox OS

imaginator — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 07:15:00 +0100

or buddycloud ❤ Firefox OS

Mozilla invited three of the buddycloud team to a Firefox OS developer event in London. Their aim is to get buddycloud working on the world’s newest mobile OS. And in time to be showcased at Mobile World Congress.

The first day was spent covering what Firefox OS could do, the second spent hacking on porting the buddycloud webclient to and installable Firefox OS package. The second day was spent developing.

The neat thing about Firefox OS is how you distribute applications: Simply adding a maifest.webapp file to the root directory and some javascript to download the project files means that any website can be ported to a phone application.

This means that anyone running a buddycloud website could also run and distribute their own mobile app together with customisations.

We need a nice way to do push notifications and wake up the buddycloud webapp when activity (like a post in one of your channels) happens. The push notification server is still being built but *should* work nicely with Abmar’s pusher component.

For the moment we have Rodrigo’s offline message counters which make discovering new messages in your channels easy.

Mozilla is also sending buddycloud some prototyping Firefox OS phones. So if you are interested in working on finishing buddycloud for Firefox OS, let me know and I’ll make the necessary arrangements to get a loaner phone out.

All the changes from this are hosted in github.com/buddycloud/webclient. The thinking is to keep the same codebase as the existing “widescreen” webclient although work on styling to get the UI more mobile-screen friendly. This is currently being achieved with a media-query and custom mobile CSS files.

Looking forward to seeing some of you at FOSDEM at the end of the month.

buddycloud Now Running on 60 Different Domains

imaginator — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:29:22 +0100

I’m really excited to announce that buddycloud is now running on 60 different domains. It’s a huge achievement and we see more and more sites installing their own buddycloud site.

Where do the stats come from?

The buddycloud crawler runs every few minutes and crawls public channels for followers and then crawls these domains or subdomains. From this regular crawling we have a fairly good idea of distinct domains that are federated and running buddycloud.

This data does not include any servers that are running behind firewalls.

More stats.

Presenting buddycloud at Mobile Monday

imaginator — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:30:27 +0100

Presenting buddycloud at Mobile Monday

buddycloud dev-preview released

imaginator — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:51:45 +0100

Today we’re releasing a dev-preview of buddycloud and would love your feedback.

buddycloud is an extensible open source distributed social network. A user’s identity looks like user@domain.com and users share content in “channels”.

We started buddycloud because of the growing “closed-ness” of existing social networks. For example Twitter’s increasing API contortions about what one can and can’t do with their API or which quadrant one is supposed to operate in. We also think it’s important to build services against a known protocol that works against any buddycloud instance on any domain (not paid-for APIs). Naturally this called for a completely decentralised design built on open standards like Atom, Activitystrea.ms and XMPP.

Each buddycloud-enabled domain runs a suite of servers. Each buddycloud server uses DNS to find, connect, and sync content in realtime with other buddycloud servers. This content can be any kind of structured data or large files.

Today we are releasing open source implementations of the following buddycloud servers: the buddycloud-channel server (shares your channel / your activity stream with trusted followers), a media server (shares anything from a small avatar to a multi-TB file), a push-server (email and mobile updates), and a taste engine (“channels you might like”). Some of the team are working on more servers that will let you suck content in and out of existing social networks.

Our reference implementations are written in Java and node and use Postgres for storing data. The web-client is built on backbone.js. There’s also a console client written in Python.

Next tasks: client speedup using IndexedDB. Following permissions, Android, iOS and Firefox OS clients and release buddycloud.js.

We really hope that some of this could be useful for your project:

code https://github.com/buddycloud
wiki https://buddycloud.org
demo instance at https://demo.buddycloud.org
channel https://demo.buddycloud.org/team@topics.buddycloud.org

buddycloud hackathon hangout:

imaginator — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 11:20:50 +0100

buddycloud hackathon hangout:

buddycloud Hackathon: 10-11 November 11am

imaginator — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 07:06:00 +0100

We’re so, so, so, so, very close to releasing the first version of buddycloud.

Get a sneek peek at this hackathon.

Schedule

Saturday 11am: Welcome and intro: What is buddycloud, how it works.
12pm - hacking ideas: Get to know everyone’s skills and break into groups to work on different teams
Lunchtime: Pizza and drinks.
moar hacking: hackety hack
Dinner time:moar hacking
evening: show-n-tell of what you have made
Sunday: Rinse, repeat

Hackathon Location

The Hillert & Co office space is at Tengstraße 37 in Munich.

take the U2 subway line to Hohenzollernplatz
take the tram line 12 or 27 to Hohenzollernplatz
take the bus line 53 to Hohenzollernplatz

The station is about a minute from the office space. If you get lost or need directions: call +49 178 545 0880

Larger map

until then…

To get ready, check out the buddycloud wiki

we track our dev work on Trello
we try to keep great buddycloud documentation
you can follow buddycloud on the mailing list and in the buddycloud chat room
all buddycloud code is open source and hosted GitHub

Additionally we’ll run a Google hangout for the duration of the summit and hackathon for those that want drop in remotely. I’ll post the URL on here when we start.

We’re looking forward to seeing you - let donna.smith@buddycloud.com know and she will keep a spot for you.

buddycloud hackathon weekend: 10+11 November

imaginator — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:57:07 +0200

A quick update: the next buddycloud hackathon will be on the 10+11 November in Munich.

We’ll post more details as details firm up.

Planning the Next buddycloud Hackathon: When?

imaginator — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:03:15 +0200

Seems there’s quite the demand for bc hackathons. At the moment we’re holding them in Munich, but if you can get enough users together on either side of another scheduled conference or event event, we could hold them in your home city.

Please help us plan on the Doodle for the next Munich hackathon

Some ideas for the next hackathon:

bc-lib.js
protocol discussions
Firefox OS client
webclient next steps
Android and iOS bits
pizza eating
variations in Munich beers
your totally random idea

Github updates via buddycloud

imaginator — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 02:48:48 +0200

Github updates via buddycloud:

If you’re not aware of them github has a set of service hooks that as a repository owner/admin you can utilise in order to push event information (be it commits, pushes, pull requests, branching, etc) to a 3rd party service. There’s a whole set of these services that you can already push to from Jenkins CI right through to Yammer, and now buddycloud!

San Francisco update

imaginator — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 05:33:58 +0200

It’s been very busy here. With a nice day off in the San Jose Hills this Saturday.

Right now we are working to finish the presentations and demo code ready for the demo-day at Mozilla.

The trip has been a chance to meet and mix with a bunch of smart people at Mozilla and in San Francisco. For example getting UX feedback from the team working on Firefox OS and business advice from the WebFWD team.

Best of all it’s been great knowing we have a team back home supporting us. Thanks Brazil, Thanks German, France, UK and everyone that has been pushing in commits and arguing their corner for building a solid buddycloud client in such a short amount of time.

Right now we are working to get MrFlix’s designs implemented.

and the new channel view:

now users can update their prefs too:

and create new posts

At the moment we are tying together the bits from the media server and the HTTP API server to build the new webclient.

And if you are in San Francisco, please do come and support us on our demo day at Mozilla or via Air Mozilla.

Thanks again to everyone pitching in. I feel very fortunate to work with such a great team.

Learning By Doing

zackrobat — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:17:10 +0200

At its core, buddycloud is a set of protocols and specifications that can be used to create a wide range of familiar web features, such as Twitter feeds, Facebook conversations, and Flickr albums; as well as an unknown and boundless set of additional applications that nobody has thought of yet.

The protocols underpinning buddycloud are completely open, and participate in a healthy, ongoing standards process. Anyone is free to write buddycloud applications, and everyone will remain free to do so, without fear of licensing fees or arbitrary API restrictions.

buddycloud threads an interesting needle: how can we enable all these powerful features, while still giving each user complete control of their personal data and their own privacy?

The solution lies in the buddycloud server, which turns anyone’s computer into an implementation of all the buddycloud protocols. We’ve written our own version of the server, but anyone is free to implement their own server as well. So long as a user’s server speaks the buddycloud language, it will be able to interact happily with all the other buddycloud servers in the world. This freedom of each user to control their own server guarantees that nobody can suddenly change the way your data is treated. You don’t need to agree to any ‘privacy policy’, because you set the privacy policy for your own data yourself.

That’s why we talk about buddycloud being ‘federated’. Each server is responsible entirely for itself, but at the same time each server is able to communicate very tightly and seamlessly with all other buddycloud servers. The result is a broad tapestry in which the full nature and behaviors of buddycloud are made available to all.

One of the problems with existing social networks has been the desire of the parent corporation to control the user experience for its own benefit. When you use facebook, it’s impossible to forget that you’re embedded in that user experience. And the goals of that parent corporation may involve things that are unrelated to what’s best for the user; such as taking maximum advantage of each user’s retinal ‘real-estate’. By giving the user total control of their own data and their experience, buddycloud doesn’t risk this temptation.

Developing the buddycloud protocols and software architecture has had its own set of challenges to overcome. Any federated system needs developers and users in order to achieve the federation; so we’ve had to engage in a lot of advocacy, while simultaneously making decisions that affect the protocols and development framework. We recently made the hard decision to do a major architectural change to our web client, which involved abandoning work that had taken a lot of time and energy to produce; we did it because it was the right technical decision, though it required a big adjustment from our whole team. And we want to recognize and make those kinds of decisions early rather than late, so the fewest number of users are affected.

In light of that, and as another part of our advocacy, we want to make our own development processes and decisions more transparent to anyone who’s interested in learning more about us. There are a lot of debates - most of them friendly, but sometimes there are strong differences between developers. And we’re going to be publishing the logs of all our developer discussions as they happen - even our video hangouts! But more than that, we’re starting a blog that will summarize a lot of the key discussions and decisions that we engage in from week to week. And from time to time you’ll hear from the buddycloud CEO, Simon Tennant, who’ll talk about various events, hacking sessions, and the strategies behind the company.

Here we are hitting the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt

imaginator — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:33:30 +0200

Here we are hitting the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt

buddycloud is seeing huge developer growth. Thanks to everyone...

imaginator — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 11:23:53 +0200

buddycloud is seeing huge developer growth. Thanks to everyone for your help!

To contribute: https://buddycloud.org/wiki/Contribute