Social Networking Goes Open Source With Insoshi

Very cool, Ruby on Rails is awesome!

Would be great if they provide hosting with this too.

I will be testing this… I will post again once I have something up and running with it. Identoo.com (running on Noserub) is also an interesting idea for a decentralized social networking platform. That way you can tap into an already built user base.

“…insists that the code he released under an MIT License in July 2007 should be considered the first RoR open source code.”

Um, wouldn’t the first RoR open source code be … RoR?

Also, if you want to talk book examples, I released the code for the “pomodo” app in Flexible Rails under the MIT license in September 2006, and people have built things using it as a foundation. But there are a ton more examples before that…

I really don’t see what the big deal is here. If you went through the RailsSpace book you would be essentially building the same thing. The code is handed to you for the price of the book, so how could it not be open sourced? I’m also disappointed with how basic it is. This is literally a weekend project in Rails. Not to dismiss it all together but they’re saving developers a few days at most. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how much more is developed. As far as I’m concerned though this is useless to me for building a viable site.

Does hosting Rails still require you to drop quite a bit on monthly server costs to just get it up and running?

Wordpress will run on just about any hosting account (like the basic GoDaddy offering). I tinkered with Rails about 18 months ago, but the first time I tried to host a test app I realised that it would cost, like, a hundy each month just for hosting.

I want to love Rails, but until it becomes cheap to throw apps online, I’m staying with PHP.

To be fair, I think BuddyPress probably better deserves the moniker “WordPress for social networks.” At a minimum, it certainly deserved a mention in this article…

@Peter: You’re right, of course. Mark meant that I said RailsSpace was to my knowledge the first open-source social networking platform in Rails, not that it was the first open-source Rails project.

@Dave: Insoshi already has more features than RailsSpace, but more importantly it’s a live project: we’re making the Insoshi developer site (http://dogfood.insoshi.com/) using Insoshi itself, and contributors can expect to see their changes on the live site within a week or two. As a result, we will be continually improving the application as the project moves forward. RailsSpace is great preparation for contributing to Insoshi, but it’s nowhere near the same level as a project.

Though not free, this is pretty awesome too:
http://www.socialengine.net/

My client and I are implementing it.

any demo site available?

@Dave: If you want to see the development effort that’s gone into Insoshi so far, check out our repository at GitHub (http://github.com/insoshi/insoshi). It’s everything from the initial commit to what’s running on the developer site right now. Michael definitely spent more than just a weekend on it. There’s a lot going on beneath the surface. And we’re just at the start.

I don’t have a clue why you would mention Broadband Mechanics or People Aggregator in this article…they’re both entirely irrelevant. Their software is absolute garbage, neither BBM or PeopleAggregator receive substantial traffic (look at Compete) and the only reason they’re mentioned anywhere is because their burnt out, blow hard founder made Valleywag a year or so ago. Christ, I forgot they even existed until I read this article. ::yawn::

hello? hellooooo? ELGG???? elgg???? http://www.elgg.org - older than all of these…and so is barnraiser…

It’s worth mentioning that the license is Affero GPL, which means you have to provide the source to your site if anyone requests it. This is probably a deal-breaker for most companies looking to build on this platform.

Also, elegant, powerful code always looks simple on the surface. In fact, that’s the mark of good code. It doesn’t look like #5 has spent much time looking at the code at all.

(re-post, it ate my comment previously)

insoshi would make a great Tutorial/Example for those in the process of learning Ruby on Rails

There definitely needs to be more implementations added for this to work nicely - it just seems like another forum script with user profiles and on RoR…

@court3nay: We went with the AGPL to prevent anyone from co-opting the Insoshi platform and making it closed-source (the way they would be able to under, say, the MIT License). The MIT License makes sense for Rails (what would a ‘closed-source’ version of Rails even look like?), but for an open-source web application the AGPL provides stronger assurances that the product will always be open source.

As far as building on Insoshi is concerned, we plan to make commercial licenses available to those who don’t want to be bound by the AGPL. (This is the same basic dual-license structure used by MySQL.)

Didn’t it seem obvious someone was going to launch that?

The bubble is about to burst.

Very nice work, thanks for sharing. Best wishes.

However,

I would be more excited if this was in Python and ran on Google App Engine…. I’d really like to see some beyond basic example code for something.

Without PHP community, a project may not grow fast. However I may take what I say back because Ruby on Rails is pretty hot right now, and they have the momentum to become something big.

And, please stop comparing/associating Ruby on Rails (framework) with PHP (language).

@Michael: There’s a big difference between GPL v3 and AGPL… With GPL v3 you don’t have to provide the source to someone who just uses the hosted app, so third party commercial developers at least have some avenues to make money. (This is a delicate balance — obviously you want to build a business too. However, the AGPL doesn’t give enough away to build a community, imho… The LGPL gives more away, so it’s easier to build a community, but it’s harder to monetize… But you know all this, obviously.) Unfortunately, as it stands now, I can’t even look at Insoshi–since I can’t touch anything AGPL’d…

I must say I’m very impressed with the look and feel of Insoshi. After strugling to get it up and running on my Mac (a path error resulted in MacPort not installing, thus FreeImage install having problems), I started to play around with the default users and Lorem postings. As with all new systems you spend some time wondering whether things are bugs or features. These are some of my initial questions:

1 Too open information when not logged in

Being used to Facebooks closed environment you soon wonder whether it is intentional to show all people and blog/forum posts to non-members. At least that could be controlled by Admin.

2 What do you gain by being connected!?

You get a limited feed, but you still get to see the full profile of people ++ (as I understand it). You can also send messages to people you are not connected to.

3 How about an invitation only option?

If Insoshi could be used as a closed social network that was open by invitation only, it would be the perfect tool for larger networks of professionals. I guess that could be an Admin option to configure that.

4 No upload function

The blog feature is very limited. I miss the oportunity to upload files and photos, +++. I’m not that concerned with text formatting tools. Again the size limits for uploads must be possible to control by Admin.

All in all I really think Insoshi have something going here and a long awaited Open Source Social Network has a bright future.

Come on!!!, why are you still supporting these kind of projects. How is it possible to run a social network platform relaying on RoR?

It is just not feasible to medium and long term neither cost effective.

@MadMax: The only reason I make the comparison between RoR and PHP is cost of hosting. EngineYard seems to suggest the minimum outlay for a Production Rails app is $600 per month. I can run WordPress on GoDaddy for $12 a month or something.

I get that RoR and PHP are different, but that difference isn’t important to (a) the user or (b) the site owner who wants to run an app (economically).

I’m the author of an MIT licensed Rails app that may be of interest to this crowd, although I’d prefer it not be called a “social networking site” if at all possible.

El Dorado is a full-stack community web application written in Ruby/Rails. It features a forum, event calendar, group chat, file sharing, random headers, avatars, themes, timezone support, and privacy settings.

Homepage: http://almosteffortless.com/eldorado
Demo and support site: http://eldorado.almosteffortless.com
Open source git repository: http://github.com/trevorturk/el-dorado/tree/master

@Phil,

Comparing the most expensive Rails hosting option to GoDaddy is a bit of stretch… you can get into decent Rails hosting starting at $20 / mo. at quantact.com or slicehost.com.

You know, social network software isn’t the problem. The problem is getting people to that network and the fact that there are 1000+ social networks and no platform to link them all.

Do I really want to re-make all of my friends and whatnot YET AGAIN!

#23 - most open-source rails applications are intended to be the framework, rather than a finished app. You’re supposed to write those features yourself

Someone’s already mentioned Elgg (Crunchbase here), but I thought I’d say a little more here. It’s based on LAMP rather than RoR, and has been around for four years. The University of Brighton became the world’s first university to run a campus-wide social network last year, and they did it on our platform.

Elgg 1.0 is out this summer, and will be released at the Elgg Jam. The new version will support widely-used data portability formats and includes extensible API and mobile functionality.

#14, are you kidding? I have in fact gone through the code and #16 is dead on. Good code or not it’s more of a glorified forum at this point. I’m sure people need more than a forum with a profile and the ability to add friends to build a SN app. This may have been enough 4 years ago, but let’s be realistic. I hope to see good things from the developers and the community, but until then it’s just a (well written) toy.

Anything written in Ruby seems very unlikely to take off like Wordpress because the net is L.A.M.P not L.A.M.R The number of ISPs that support Ruby are effectively almost zero where as pretty much all ISPs support PHP. That doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.

I’m not sure how this turned into a PHP vs Rails debate — Rails is a viable platform with enough reliable & affordable hosting options. If you’re already running a LAMP stack then you can always stick with a PHP solution, just like it you’re runing Windows I guess you’ll be looking at DNN or Community Server.

Part of what we do when offering SNS consulting is try to work with clients’ platform preferences (if any), so it’s always nice to know about alternatives IMO.