NoseRub Blog Blogging about NoseRub and Social Networks

Can NoseRub replace FriendFeed?

After Facebook buying FriendFeed, some questions arose wether NoseRub could be an open and free alternative to FriendFeed.

While NoseRub never was designed to imitate FriendFeed (in fact I got aware of FriendFeed a while after I started coding on NoseRub), you can do a lot of those things in NoseRub, that you do in FriendFeed.

What’s similar

The basic idea of NoseRub is: you create a profile with information about yourself and of course various web accounts you have around. Under this profile URL, other people can see a stream of all those activities you added to your profile.

Other people can also comment on those entries and mark them as favorites.

You can also add other NoseRub profile URLs as contact to get a stream of activities from your network.

So, this all is basically what FriendFeed does, too.

What’s better

NoseRub is free and OpenSource, what might not be an advantage point for all you out there, but it is important to know that NoseRub cannot vanish, because someone else buys it and decides to bury it.

But NoseRub is also decentralised. That means that comments and favorites are distributed between various servers on which NoseRub was installed. So, if you have a NoseRub server running on yourownserver.com and add me as a contact, you will see all my activities in the stream of your contacts. Once I add a new web account (eg flickr) to my profile, you will get that, too.

If you then make a comment on one of my photos which you see on your contact’s activity stream on yourownserver.com, this comment will also appear on identoo.com!

But you don’t need to have a NoseRub account somewhere to comment my photos. Just go to identoo.com, log in with any OpenID and go to the photo of mine on identoo.com you would like to comment on. It’s just like using OpenID on blogs to identify yourself.

NoseRub is also a full server/client for laconi.ca and of course an OpenID provider.

What is missing

Realtime of course, but that’s just a question of server power. NoseRub was designed in order to be installed on any server that also can hold a wordpress installation. So, no fancy Memcache, XMPP servers, etc..

For now! We’re just a small team of currently four people working on NoseRub - and we’re doing this only part time. So we concentrate on making this thing work. Better to have decentralisation working than have a perfect scalable AMI image for hundreds of thousands of users.

I rather would like to see hundreds of thousands of single NoseRub installations rather than a couple of huge installations.

We’re currently working on groups, too. And once I figure out what “Hiding” exactly does in FriendFeed, I will put this on our ToDo-List.

Conclusion

I understand that we lack of documentation on NoseRub and I will try to solve this issue by answering questions in more upcoming blog posts. Many things are currently in the state of “it works” to show the functionality, but need a lot of polish to make it “bulletproof”. Therefore the lack of documentation, as most of the things are currently meant to be very simple and not really publishable.

But I will overcome this shyness and share our ideas in more detail