So back in August, FriendFeed announced that they were being acquired by Facebook. Naturally, everyone expressed fears that FriendFeed would be consumed by Facebook and we would be left without the service that many of us have come to call our digital homes.
That gave birth to the idea of creating a clone of FriendFeed, based on the APIs that FriendFeed has published. That idea became known as OpenFF.
Over the past several months there has been some planning surrounding OpenFF, along with a proof of concept for distributed social networking called Dango Daikazoku だんご大家族 (aka socnode) written by directeur.
However, truth be told, not much has really happened with the core OpenFF effort for the past couple of months for a number of reasons. The most significant reason is that there are only a handful of people who have volunteered to contribute code to OpenFF. directeur has contributed the most to the effort with socnodes, but there haven’t been many other people who have contributed anything substantial (included myself, regrettably).
Do we even need OpenFF anymore?
The short answer is “Yes.” The long answer is a little more complicated, of course. There are a number of reasons to try to continue the OpenFF effort, many of which revolve around FriendFeed’s long-term viability.
FriendFeed’s leadership has assured us that FriendFeed will be around for a while. And I’m definitely happy to hear that. I hope that FriendFeed never shuts down. I intend to stick with FriendFeed to the end. But the reality is that FriendFeed developers no longer have the final say on if or when FriendFeed could be shut down. Facebook does. Facebook owns FriendFeed now.
So ultimately, it’s still in our best interest to develop an Open Source alternative to FriendFeed based on FriendFeed’s APIs.
What’s the plan now?
When the OpenFF project was originally conceived, the plan was to implement the FriendFeed API in python. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I’ve decided from a personal standpoint that I’m not really excited about coding in python. Most of my day-to-day work is in PHP. I like PHP. I don’t want to split my mental energy between two different languages.
So personally, I’m not. I’ve started working on an implementation of the OpenFF API in PHP. My goals are three-fold:
- for now, just worry about getting it to work
- it doesn’t have to be pretty
- get something out there for others to hack on
I haven’t committed anything to the git master yet, but I will be in the next couple of weeks. My intention is to have the guts of APIv2 working, with no initial consideration for creating a front- end.
How can you help?
Well, from a coding standpoint, there’s the aforementioned socnode project. But from the standpoint of the code I’m working on, there’s nothing out there to help with yet. But once my commit is pushed out the master, individuals will be able to submit patches and request write access to the master.
There are plenty of other things to do, though. There’s the OpenFF wiki, which contains notes from our initial flurry of planning. If you’re interested in helping out there, all you have to do is create an account and start editing.
There’s also the OpenFF CMS (based on Joomla), which is currently not completely setup and ready to use. If you’re interested in helping complete the setup of the CMS, create a template for it or just provide some content, please send email to jhuebel@openff.org.
