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.

When we first started working on Hiitch our focus was mainly on on-line dating. However, as we progressed, we realized that Hiitch was becoming more and more like a dedicated and secure social networking software than merely an on-line dating tool. We like to see ourselves as still in the process of allowing our users discover for themselves what Hiitch really is to them. In this article I would like to discuss a few examples of how you can make use of Hiitch for your own social networking purposes. Hiitch has many features that can help you deal with your everyday social networking needs that cannot be found in today’s instant messaging (IM) culture. Before I go on, I like to highlight the fact that Hiitch is not and never will be an IM software. IM is only a supported feature in Hiitch and not what it is about. Hiitch is about discovering new people on-line and providing a common ground to communicate and share yourself with others. OK lets proceed with the scenarios that Hiitch can be of use to you.

Scenario One: Work

You have a small company or team that you work with. Everyone is usually hard at work on their own desk all the time. Some of them are physically not in the office most of the time. You would like to setup a dedicated network with them so that you can share things on-line and communicate more simply together at real time. You thought about using MySpace, Facebook and etc to help you tie everyone together but you hate the idea of checking your web browser all the time for new information. You are also skeptical about all the negative publicity about security and etc from these service providers. You feel that the common IM software like MSN live, Yahoo messenger, and etc just isn’t cut out for your social networking needs. This is where Hiitch can help you.

Hiitch sits nicely on your system tray and notifies you when items of your interests are received. Your contact comes on-line, you are notified (only if you want to). Someone in the team sends you an urgent file, you get notified and that file remains available for you always at anytime and anywhere until you choose to remove it yourself. If you are offline, messages send to you are kept for you until you come on-line. You can even send quick messages to your teammates without disturbing them during their work through your contact list. Your on-line status on Hiitch will help maintain your intentions to others in the network. So, if you set ‘do not disturb’, then no one can IM you directly. If you set yourself to ‘private’ then only your contacts will see you as on-line and etc. A new team member comes aboard and you are interested to get to know him/her, you can simply browse their profile card and read more about them, browse their photographs and etc. You can post news about company events or instructions on the community interface and notify your team as soon as you post them. If you keep them private, only your teammates in your contact list will be able to read them. You can also get others outside your team involved when you require feedback on ideas, get advice from others or want to do a community survey. You can also setup appointments with your teammate in another country without worrying about time zone conversions, Hiitch does it for you automatically and notifies both of you when the appointment is due.

Scenario Two: Play

Have you ever considered your own secure private social network? You are old enough to be responsible for yourself. You want to meet new people and get others to notice you. However, you don’t want to look desperate and try those on-line match making sites like eHarmony, Match and etc. You like your social life to pick up but you want to do that at your own time and have it all in your own control. You would also like to keep your existing friends and family as part of your private social network. This is where Hiitch can also help you.

Hiitch allows you to setup your own prospect criteria and helps you find them automatically. You just need to make sure you put in the right information about yourself and the kind of people you are looking for and leave the rest to Hiitch. When Hiitch finds people that you may be interested in, you get notified about them. You can then choose to view their profile immediately or bookmark them for later browsing. If the person that you have bookmarked has also done like wise, then Hiitch will notify both sides to encourage you to get to know each other better. Hiitch helps you keep track on the interactivity with others on your contact list. When you see that your interactivity with your best friend is getting low, you can send him/her gifts to brighten his/her day or just simply message or IM to keep in touch. Hiitch is not just about serious social networking. You can also search for other people manually and browse their profiles and pictures at your own time. You can even vote for pictures that you think are cool or just purely interesting if you like them. If you find a handsome man or babe, give them the compliment by voting for their pictures. You can also publicize about yourself by writing articles for the Hiitch community at your own spare time to share your views and ideas with others. Who knows, may be you might just become the most popular person within our community.

Hiitch is made for you to reach out to others and also for others to reach out to you simply and easily! There is much you can discover with Hiitch. Try it for yourself today by signing up for our private invitation into Hiitch.

After couple months of waiting, I finally got my hands on trying out Joost. I must admit I have been following Joost or formerly known as The Venice Project for quite sometime, perhaps due to the buzz surrounding it. I have seen the screen shot and read their articles, in fact you could say I was quite prepared to be dazzle by what Joost had to offer.

The entire download and installation process of Joost is very straightforward and didn’t take long just like Hiitch. ;) However my initial run of Joost was immediately greeted with problems, the loading of the channel seems to take forever. I have to restart Joost a few times to get connected to one of their programmes. The image quality is fairly decent for an online tv but the programme selection, limited. I understand they are in the process of acquiring additional content with other media companies. Aside from some unexpected UI behavior, the only complain I had is that the video screen get buried by other application or windows when you switched away from it. Joost could really use a feature like “Always on Top” to toggle the screen so that I can check my email and still not miss the show.

Overall Joost is a good application with a brilliant concept but not an excellent one yet. It needs a better UI interface, spoilt for choice channel selection, solid image quality and tons of networking features to really pull audience away from their normal goggle box.

The idea of online TV utilizing peer-to-peer technology to stream programme to your computer is nothing new, take for example the chinese software TVants and PPstream. Both downloadable video playback application offer more channels and programmes to choose from. However the social features for such application remains largely untapped. Joost is definitely heading the right direction by including features like chat, instant messaging and rating system into their application. I simply love the idea that you can chat with other user while watching the same programme.

Likewise, peer-to-peer communication tool has been around for the longest time but none of them offer very comprehensive social networking features. I like to think of Hiitch as a very simple communication tool with tons of wonderful social networking features built onto it. Who knows maybe in the future we may just include our own tv network into Hiitch.