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Hiitch
July 25th, 2007, 07:55 AM
This is a similar post from Community Market from a week ago, it is not our intention to spam this forum but to get better feedback to our proposal to the Ubuntu community.

We are a software company that develops social networking products. I recently wrote an article on whether to open source our product (Hiitch (http://hiitch.com)) or not at our blog (http://www.hiitch.com/blog/2007/07/03/is-open-source-the-way-to-go).

And as a follow up to that article I would like to do a social experiment with Hiitch and the Ubuntu community. We hope to see if the Ubuntu community desires a software product like Hiitch or find such a product useful before making our final decision on whether to open source Hiitch or not.

Hiitch's primary development environment is on Ubuntu. Its server also runs on Ubuntu. By the way, only gnome is supported by Hiitch for now. And Hiitch definitely runs better on Linux then on Windows! :)

We like to invite you to join us for this social experiment. Just go to our website (http://hiitch.com) and download Hiitch (http://hiitch.com/download.html), install and off you go. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

If you are a software geek like me, you might also enjoy the recent added article (http://www.hiitch.com/blog/2007/07/24/the-technology-behind-hiitch/) that discusses in more detail the technologies behind building a complete desktop social networking platform like Hiitch.

DoctorMO
July 25th, 2007, 08:20 AM
It's interesting, could I ask you why it's an application and not a website as such? Or are there features that just can't be done in a browser?

Adamant1988
July 25th, 2007, 08:22 AM
It does look like a really interesting concept. I'll have to try it out.

The one thing that disappoints me in all social networks is that they have nearly no value until you have tons of contacts. Is hitch doing anything to be practical outside of the realm of the social?

Hiitch
July 25th, 2007, 09:59 AM
I guess most social networks are done on websites these days. But there are pros and cons of both approaches. You should be able to find many discussion on this issue. I will avoid starting a web vs app war here. :-)

Our concept of Hiitch is to build social networks from your immediate contacts and personalize that community. In short, it is to grow your own private networks without letting the whole world in. In most instances, many people only have a few contacts that they socialize with on a regular basis. A smaller community also means everyone gets to know each other better through invitation of close friends that we trust.

On current web based solutions, there are lots of things you cannot control and privacy is often the thing that suffers. Most social networking sites just want millions of users to come into their network so they can make money of of you from advertizing. Of cause we also want to make money to put food on the table and continue to do what we love (software development) but we believe that our way of approach may be better. Why? You get better control of your personal network. And when you start with a trusted network, the risk of having thousands of sex offenders browsing your social network is less. If there is, you or your close friends would be the one responsible for it because you let them in.

smoker
July 25th, 2007, 10:13 AM
can you explain this in simple language, it seems to me anything posted on hiitch would then belong to you, or am i reading this wrong?

terms of use
http://hiitch.com/terms.html
By posting Member Content in Hiitch community, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Hiitch an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid-up, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Member Content from our network.

Hiitch
July 25th, 2007, 10:25 AM
I guess, Hiitch does try to be useful from our perspective. :) Many people like going to social networks for their own reasons and everyone's reasons differ. Hence, usefulness of a particular tool as such also often differ.

We hope to work towards open sourcing Hiitch so that people could customize for themselves what they think is useful to them then contribute that functionality back to the community for others to enjoy. We think that there are lots of talent out there and we want to make Hiitch a social platform for them to showcase themselves. :)

Hiitch was never intended to be open sourced at first. So our previous license was meant to be commercial. As such you can now ignore our old license because our direction have changed. We are now working towards GPL v3.

Hiitch
July 25th, 2007, 10:33 AM
It will take us a while to move towards GPL v3 so at the moment we are still using the old commercial license. I estimate the move to be done in about a month or so. It took us a while to decide on the issue of open source so as of now we are trying our best to complete the license move.

In the new GPL v3 license, you will host your own private Hiitch network so whatever content that gets updated to your server is now your responsibility. :)

Tomosaur
July 25th, 2007, 11:15 AM
It certainly sounds like an interesting project, I've never really seen a non web-based social networking thing like this. I applaud your desire to open-source Hitch, and I'm sure, if you choose to do so, you will find many new members. It will also allow users to create a Hitch client for other platforms which may not currently be supported, aswell as increased security and, of course, new features, better compatability with other technology, and so on and so forth.

As you can see from the growth rate of this forum, and virtually any Linux oriented website out there, Linux users tend to be very social. We like sharing and talking to other people (of course, there are always exceptions!), so I can imagine Hitch would be successful in an open-source environment.

Good luck anyway, I'll look forward to hearing about your progress :)

Hiitch
July 25th, 2007, 12:24 PM
Thanks for your encouragement Tomosaur! I really appreciate it. :D

DBO
July 25th, 2007, 01:59 PM
I think you might want to consider changing the install path to /opt/hitch so as to avoid it going in with the rest of the users packages stuff. That said, I think your being so honest and open about considering open sourcing hitch is just great!

Adamant1988
July 25th, 2007, 05:36 PM
I'm a bit curious how you plan to monetize on this...

Tomosaur
July 25th, 2007, 05:59 PM
I'm a bit curious how you plan to monetize on this...

You pay for the service rather than the software. If you go to their web page, you can see the option for a 'Premium Member'. It offers some improved services and more features than a simple free account does. As far as I'm aware, they're more or less the first company offering such a service on Linux at least.

Hiitch
July 26th, 2007, 04:36 AM
Our old business model was to do as Tomosaur was saying. And we will keep growing our default network, the one that we are offering now. We hope to use it as a network for developers to collaborate, communicate and get directly in touch with us. I am there all the time except when I sleep. ;) So anyone can feel free to talk or message me.

But we are also working towards the possibility of dual licensing and requesting our community users who wants to build their own private network (using Hiitch) to leave the advertisements there. It is strictly not required but as a good will we ask that our users will allow us to use that as a way of making some initial financial support. If we can manage to get the finances we need without the need for those commercial slots than we will take them out of the default code ourselves.

We want to break the strong hold idea that everyone must hang out in one main service like the many IM applications around (eg. MSN, Yahoo, facebook, etc). We view each individual social network in Hiitch as a socially self sufficient group. We will then work towards giving them the possibility of linking these individual groups into a larger network of peers. You can view a diagram of what I mean by an "individual social network" here (http://www.hiitch.com/blog/2007/07/24/the-technology-behind-hiitch/).

ZacDavis
July 26th, 2007, 04:45 AM
the install.sh seems to do nothing for me

Hiitch
July 26th, 2007, 05:02 AM
Only Gnome is supported for now. Hiitch does not show up on your system tray in KDE due to issues with Java and KDE.

When installing Hiitch on Ubuntu, use the sudo command with install.sh. The reason why sudo is required is because Hiitch needs to startup on its own when Gnome starts up. You should see a yellow or gray icon on your system tray when Hiitch is started up.

To remove Hiitch from desktop startup you can either edit your Gnome session or if you still want to keep Hiitch, use the options available on the login panel of the GUI. To open the GUI, either right click on the yellow/gray icon to get a menu or double click on it.

If you had said no to starting Hiitch during installation (which you should if you are root!) then you can either login again to Gnome to get Hiitch auto started or start Hiitch manually as stated in the Readme file. Eg "java -jar start.jar". After the install, Hiitch will auto start itself everytime you login to Gnome, just not during the current Gnome session. Our installation script is a quick hack because we had never targeted Linux as part of our main community. But that has changed after our decision to open source Hiitch.

Hope this helps.

loell
July 28th, 2007, 06:47 AM
it would be nice if ubuntu community could come up with a python version of the program in the future or a lightweight c for that matter ;)

Frak
July 28th, 2007, 08:40 AM
it would be nice if ubuntu community could come up with a python version of the program in the future or a lightweight c for that matter ;)
+1, I may dab into that sometime :)