We have revamped our website and blog. We will no longer post on this blog. Please update all your feeds and bookmarks as all future post will be directed to our new blog site. See you there!

We are going to add compression to our 128 bit SSL streams. This will improve connection speeds on the whole but unfortunately break previous client binaries. In short, members of our current default network before the next upcoming release will have to uninstall, re-download and install the next upcoming client release that supports the new compression feature in order to sign in to our platform. Automatic upgrade is not available for this new release.

Our testings have shown that we are able to improve connection speeds by an average of 5.4 seconds using a common 512KB down stream 256KB up stream broadband line. We are pretty excited about this new improvement and hope that this new and improved technology will help better improve your experience on Hiitch. Therefore as an advance warning, you might want to take this into consideration in regard to your private network implementations of the Hiitch platform.

Do feel free to contact us if you have any questions, collaboration proposals or need better support from us with regard to your own network implementations using our platform.

Hiitch introduces new features for different virtual networks to merge so that their members can communicate with each other while maintaining separate or shared resources such as instant messaging (IM), news broadcast, community live boards and etc. It will allow the administrator to create totally separated virtual networks and/or merging those that may require their members to interact within a single physical server to form a larger network. The main idea is to give a greater degree of control, flexibility and privacy by defining distinct network groups and their resources but still allow members from different groups to mix and match when desired.

Members of virtual networks that are standalone can only communicate among their own registered members and access resources such as IM, news broadcast, community live boards and etc that belong to their own network. Hence these standalone networks are considered totally private and isolated. Shared virtual networks allow access from members of different virtual networks based on separate individual network access control lists. Future developments will include support for these features across different physical servers.

Hiitch now supports virtual networks on a single server. What this basically means is that you can now host multiple distinct desktop social networks on a single Hiitch server. The main advantage of this new feature is sharing and reducing both hardware and bandwidth cost. This new feature is useful when you have distinct social groups which you may want to keep separated without running multiple servers. The cool part about our virtual network feature is that a new network can be added while the other existing networks are up and running at the same time. No reboots, no need to reconfigure or restart the server.

The Hiitch server can accept runtime administration instructions such as adding a new network, removing an existing user and so on while the server is still actively running. These runtime administration instructions are just simple XML files that tells the server what to do when an instruction is issued. Issuing an instruction is as easy as placing the XML instruction file into the runtime instruction folder of the server’s setup directory.

Our New Networking Services

With the introduction of this new virtual networking feature, we are also planning to launch our private network services soon. These services will allow your company/club/organization to purchase a dedicated network from us for a low monthly fee. We will setup and manage everything for you such as hardware, bandwidth, security and upgrade & maintenance. Hence everything is handled for your company/club/organization and there is no effort from your part or the need for any dedicated manpower such as programmers, geeks and administrators. Do let us know if you are interested in purchasing such a service.

It has been quite a while since our last post, here’s a quick update on what we are doing right now. Besides bug fixing, we have upgraded our server to improve the overall performance of Hiitch. Everything seems whole lot faster now.

Over the next few months, we will be simplifing the procedure for you to set up your own network with Hiitch. This significant improvement will allow you to set up your own niche community in just a few quick steps. On top of that, we will start a market place and invite developers to build and sell features add-on for Hiitch. Lastly an overhaul of our main website, we have been receiving alot of criticism about our website and we hear you.

As you can see, lots of exciting things are about to happen. Do subscribe to our blog for the latest update.