Stake Ventures

To make Talk.org a playground for more than just me, I’ve decided to open source it. You can find it on GitHub

I have released it as GPL3 as I think it makes sense for an app like Talk.org that we all get to learn from our experiences.

I will do my best to bring as many new features people create into the live application as possible. However be aware that at some point I may want to put some unobtrusive ads or something on it to make to pay future AppEngine bills. You have been warned. But then again you could do so yourself if you so please.

Anyway, it is a fairly simple app at the moment and is not seing large amount of use, however a fair amount of people came to try it out during the Stevenote.

These are the performance graphs from the Google AppEngine Dashboard:

The requests seem to take about 500ms each, which should improve once memcache is working properly again:

So far we have 58 users who have posted in total 166 posts. Not bad really for a tiny app, originally written last Friday over breakfast.

So far the todo list is:

• Allow users to pick their own nickname when signing up (right now it relies on what Google gives me, which is wrong)
• Atom/RSS/JSON support
• OAuth
• Followers
• Tracking

Concensus seems to be that the best way to do IM/SMS support is for a 3rd party server todo it via OAuth/HTTP as AppEngine doesn’t yet support XMPP. This is obvious as a great separate project for some Erlang geek out there.

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Well it’s not exactly a twitter clone as you can’t follow or track anyone. There is no IM or SMS support either. However you are able to do some of what you would do on Twitter. So it might come in helpful during Steve Job’s keynote if Twitter goes down. Go to Talk.org to try it out.

This is my first little play project using Google Appengine

Right now it just uses Google Accounts, so for most people you don’t even need to sign up.

So what’s next for Talk.org

My original plan for this was not for it to go the Twitter clone way. There are a few features that I think might be more fun to do than trying to be an exact clone of twitter.

Following and Tracking should not be too overly complicated features to add. But I may endup being wrong about that. From my understanding Twitter’s real scalability problems are from these two features and not the messaging plat form itself.

I’m thinking that unless they’re well designed these may endup presenting problems even on AppEngine. Of course they would only be a problem if you got people with extremely large amount of followers.

I can’t see implementing IM and SMS in the current architecture of AppEngine. However it might be possible to create a separate messaging server using Amazon EC2.

There is also a really annoying bug in Memcache on AppEngine that pretty much excludes the use of the Memcache API until it’s fixed. They are working on it so lets see.

I don’t want to use too much time on this, maybe just an hour or two a week in the future, but I think I may post the code to GitHub as soon as I get it cleaned up a bit.

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You too should also make sure that your rails apps are updated to Rails 1.1.6 due to the recently announced security hole.

Thanks to the Rails team for handling this quickly.

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OneCommune has just published an interview with me about my discussion system Talk.org.

OneCommune is a great resource for forum operators. Il foro de tutti Forae you might say if you like me know neither Latin nor Italian.

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So as promised I’ve released a major update to Talk.org.

You can now register as a member and do such things as:

• Use a nickname
• Delete your own messages
• Vote on messages
• Report spam

I have also done lots of optimizations as well as added help text throughout. You know it’s funny that I can blog all day long writing about all sorts of things, but it is really difficult for me to write the blurbs that need to go along with an application. Go figure.

I am not done yet either with Talk.org. I will be adding multiple nicknames, sub domains and custom message types as soon as possible.

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