We are now officially open sourced. Now you can build, customize and hack your own desktop social networking platform using Hiitch. Hiitch offers you not just a client program to some proprietary server but an entire open sourced desktop social networking platform that is real time, secure and totally free.

You can read more about how the Hiitch platform works through these articles:

• Network Connection Overview
• Software Components Overview
• Security Overview

Become part of our community today and tell us about how you are using Hiitch to meet your own needs.

Enjoy.

The Hiitch platform consists of three basic software components. These components are aggregated together on the desktop to produce a seamless real time social networking system. In due time more components may be added to provide richer functionality and online services but we will just focus on these three components for now.

Hiitch Server
The server is the most critical component of the entire platform. It manages all the critical information and the security of the platform. The Hiitch server is a very advanced piece of software. It understands complex instructions and allow the clients to interact with it through pure XML. It was designed to function very much like our human brain. At the core, it is preloaded by a set of generic instructions that are common to many online services provided by web servers. However, it is far more advanced than today’s web servers in the way it processes and understands information. A typical interaction with the server starts with the client communicating a set of XML instructions to the server. The server then processes the client’s XML request and resolves them into a combination of runtime instructions. These instructions are then aggregated to perform a complex operation. The server will also determine at this point if the requesting client is part of the system and is authorized to carry out those operations. If all is well, it executes and processes the request and returns any results. Each interaction between the server and the client are done on a dedicated pool of threads that provides the parallel processing nature of the server. Depending on your hardware, you can decide on how you want to scale the server to meet your number crunching needs by tuning the threading model. You can also easily customize the server’s runtime behavior and operations by adjusting the instruction set that it is preloaded with. We will discuss more about the details of the server on another post.

Hiitch IM Server
Hiitch was never meant to be an instant messaging (IM) system. IM in Hiitch is just another feature that we provided as a means of communication and not its defining characteristic. Hiitch is a social networking platform which has IM facilities among many others and not the other way around. With that said, the IM facilities in Hiitch is very much a peer to peer (P2P) system. The IM facilities should be more accurately called a routing facility than a chat server. The reason for this is that, the IM server does nothing more than route the interaction between both clients to each other. It does no processing except to work with the Hiitch server to determine if the clients are authorized to use the system and to notify both parties of any incoming initiation for interactions. There is a need for this routing facility because many networks are not designed or configured to work with a P2P system. The IM facilities on Hiitch is still very much a work in progress and you will see more of it in later stages of our development.

External Services
External services are not connected to the Hiitch server in any way. Client developers are free and encouraged to implement facilities and features of their own through this avenue. Although external services are not considered part of the Hiitch platform, but it is still part of the social interaction process that the user is experiencing on their desktop. We have implemented two examples on the client that we thought was useful. The first one is the delivery of interesting events as an autosuggestion to the user based on his/her location and profile. The second is the real time updating of the user’s shout message and default picture to our web widget that can be found on our blog. Developers desiring to extend this portion of the Hiitch platform do not need to understand how the Hiitch system functions but are still able to integrate their software into our social networking experience.

You can read more about Hiitch’s Network Connectivity Overview here.

I hope that this article will get you excited about developing with and on the Hiitch platform. You are encouraged to sign up an account with our default network and use it as a means to contact us or interact with other developers of the Hiitch platform. Just download the default client and join us today as part of our community!

We are making our decision public. Hiitch is going to be open sourced. At the moment, we are working towards GNU GPL version 3 which should serve our objectives well. Now you can build your own private desktop social network using Hiitch without reinventing the wheel. With open source, you can hack on a complete desktop social networking platform like Hiitch to customize it to your own liking or build new and interesting features and contribute it back to the community. We are not just offering you a client software but an entire platform with total freedom. Whether you want to build a private network for your family, friends, company, lab or organization, Hiitch is what you want to try out.

For researchers who are interested to build on the Hiitch platform, you can use it to experiment with peer to peer (P2P) networking models, client and server models and etc. Unlike web based solutions, you will never be stuck with a client and server model. Hiitch will allow you to build a controlled environment for your classes and students to do more effective online social networking studies. We invite you to innovate and experiment with us to build new technologies for the social networking messes. Make Hiitch your preferred social networking platform today!

We estimate our complete move to open source Hiitch should take us about a month or so. But why wait, join our network now and see what you can do with Hiitch or find other developers to collaborate with or contact us directly. We are specially inviting all Linux + Gnome users to join our little social experiment with Hiitch. You can read more about our discussion with other Ubuntu users here.

This is the first of many technical articles that we will be releasing as we begin our work to bring Hiitch to you as promised in our previous blog postings. We will basically focus on the technology behind building a complete desktop social networking platform like Hiitch and how you can better utilize it for your own purposes without reinventing the wheel. Your suggestions and feedback will be greatly appreciated. You can also write to us about what you would like to know regarding the technologies behind Hiitch.

Hiitch is designed and developed to build a vibrant online community on the desktop. It delivers things of interest such as new people and events to the user by analyzing the user’s profile. It does automatic match making and has an array of features to allow users to interact online (eg. IM, file sharing, photo sharing, community forums, etc) at real time. All these are done securely on the desktop using technologies such as digital signature verification, SSL, data encryption and etc.

Another discussion on Hiitch’s security features can also be found from our previous posting:

How Secure Is Hiitch?

Hiitch is basically (or partially) a client and server networking model. It is not intended to work with web proxies as they post as a big security risk and information leak. All communication done on Hiitch has to be done with direct connections to either the server or the client. A peer to peer model (p2p) for the clients is not used because not all networks allow p2p technologies to work correctly. Some networks hide their computers with transparent proxies to better protect their internal network which result in p2p connection problems. Other disadvantages include the fact that users must have enough know how to configure their home or private network to work with p2p solutions (port forwarding, firewall, DMZ and etc). Often than not a home or private network consists of a group of computers (LAN) and this will require multiple IP addresses not available to most home users. P2P is still a very good networking model and we are still experimenting on how best to combine both p2p models and the more traditional client server models to produce a best of both world solution.

Internally, Hiitch uses a technique similar to remote procedure call (RPC). We will discuss this in more detail in a separate post. All communication data in Hiitch is transmitted using XML. This decision was to allow the client and server to become technology independent and open up possibilities to “just in time” instruction discoveries. So regardless of the programming language used to build the server or client, the only requirement for them (to communicate) is understanding XML. Each instruction(s) send from the client to the server is decrypted (when necessary), parsed and resolved into a set of runtime instructions. These instructions are then checked to see if they are allowed to run. Finally, the instructions are then executed on the server and any results available are returned to the client.

We hope this article will get you excited about Hiitch and the technology behind it. Our hope is that we can build a strong community of experts who are interested and willing to work with us to produce ground breaking social networking technologies for the generations ahead. Join our community today!

Have you ever wanted to build your own personal Yahoo Messager or MSN Live network? A private and secure network that is only for your family, company, organization, friends, peers and etc. You want to stay connected with your friends and family online but you don’t want the whole world to be connected to your network. That way you can have the freedom to be personal to your contacts without sacrificing any of your privacy on the Internet. You will no longer have to worry about big companies hosting your private data, messages and pictures or using you as a promotion for their benefit. You are now able to build your own trusted social network just for your personal community. Imagine that you can have your own:

• Personal channel of real time communication.
• Share intimate pictures with family and friends.
• Share private and confidential videos or documents with each other.
• Discover for yourself your children’s friends, parent’s friends and etc within your own secure private network.
• Share your daily activities online with your friends and family and not loss your privacy or that of your community.
• And much more, the possibilities are endless!

If all these sounds exciting to you, then Hiitch is what you want! We at Hiitch have decided to take a three step approach to helping you achieve all that we have mentioned above. We want to thank all those who have written to us about your opinions on open sourcing Hiitch. After considering all your suggestions, we have decided to move Hiitch in these three stages:

Stage 1: Hiitch is close source and only the client is available for download. Join us to actively build the Hiitch community together.
Stage 2: Make both the server and client binaries available for you to use and build your own private desktop social networks.
Stage 3: If our community of users have a strong desire to open source Hiitch, then we will open source Hiitch!

All that we ask of you is to help build the Hiitch community with us. Get involve with us by telling us why you want a system like Hiitch. If you want to try Hiitch to see what you can do with it, then join our community today! You can download a completely free copy of Hiitch client from our website to try it out as a demo. Currently we have a very limited network bandwidth used for demo purposes only so you may experience a slight issue in terms of performance but it should give you a good feel of the product features and what you can use it for.

In the future, we hope to allow you (our community) to decide on the features that you would like to have on Hiitch or to contribute code to Hiitch if we do open source it depending on your demand. We can even collaborate and build decentralized desktop networks to help everyone on Hiitch to stay connected, if desired. Come join us and participate in a new era of personal desktop social networking. let us create social networking history together today!

Help us spread the word if what we have proposed interest you and become part of our community decision making process.