As we get more and more connected through social networking services like Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and Facebook, the commercial nature of those services starts to intrude into the picture in a somewhat discordant manner. After all, what we are constructing here is the linked-up global intelligence of humanity and that should not necessarily be in the hands of commercial interests.
Enter Insoshi, an open source project to develop the next social networking service.
Insoshi is a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product!
It all started with Ruby on Rails, a programming environment introduced by Michael Hartl in a book titled “Rails Space: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails“. Hartl uses a tutorial to build a social network as the means to introduce and teach Ruby on Rails to programmers.
The idea of developing Insoshi grew out of this book tutorial and the project to come up with the best open -source networking platform has now been opened up to contributions from developers and others interested in changing the social networking landscape. (http://portal.insoshi.com/)
While work is proceeding on this, someone thought to build a complementary currency system on top of Insoshi. A post describing how this is being done is at OsCurrency Demo Site and Github Repository
The currency system has been implemented and is actually being used by the Austin Time Exchange, a local exchange network in Austin, Texas. The members of the Austin Time Exchange Network use the system to keep track of hours of services performed for others in their circle. There is also a demo site that’s based on a somewhat pared down version of the Austin Time Exchange implementation. It can be seen and tested at http://demo.opensourcecurrency.org.
While both the social networking platform and the alternative currency implementation have some way to go before becoming fully functional, it is good to see that development is going in the direction of open source software for these important applications.