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.

Our very own Hiitch wallpaper to grace your desktop. In case you are wondering, the above title translates to “I Drool over Hiitch Wallpaper”. Drop us a comment and let us know what you think of our wallpaper.

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This is one of the frequently argued about topics in the last while. I have tried to stay away from it but it seems that I cannot avoid it. There are a few people who have feedback to us that they will never try Hiitch just because they have to download and install it. I guess the terms ‘download and install’ has become the signature of a desktop application. In my personal opinion views such as these are really disappointing to hear. Disappointing not because they are right but because they come from a very narrow and one sided view point. The web browser for example is also a desktop application, even though almost all web based applications are build on top of it. Without a pre-installed OS on your hardware, the web browser is completely useless. Without the web browser installed on your desktop, the billions of web applications sitting out on the Internet is useless. To me, neither the desktop applications are better nor are web based applications superior. They each do well for different purposes.

I think that most users take for granted that because there are already existing desktop applications that help them to do what they want, there is no need for anything else. Some people even goes as far as to suggest that everything else in the computing world should be in the web browser. Which is an even more disappointing notion. The fact is that we need desktop applications and technology in order to access web based applications. Good technology cannot be about one single concept but a combination of many good concepts. The key to creating a good technology, hence good engineering is the idea of using the best tools (or a mix of the best tools) for the job.

Innovation is the key factor that drives technology. Innovation has always been driven by people who can find good but different solutions to a particular problem. And because the problems often differ, the solutions will also differ. Everything else is a matter of personal preference. Whether you like to use your personal email client or Gmail, Yahoo mail and etc. is a matter of personal preference and your data storage needs. Some people like their mails kept on the email client on their laptop for privacy, others prefer them on a pop mail server for easier access with the web browser. The bottom line question then is not which is better but which one best fits your needs. In my opinion, neither one is going to go away anytime soon because both of them are still helping people solve their problems but in different ways.

At Hiitch we follow the principle that good engineering drives innovation and innovation drives technology. We think that social networking and online dating by its nature contains many private information that should not be made easily available on public Internet terminals. Hence, in our opinion we think that any proper solution in this problem domain has to be personalized to the individual user’s desktop. However, the solution must not restrict itself to the desktop but reaches out to other online users on the network. We try to take the best of the web, the desktop and merge them together into a good solution. In this solution we have incorporated good web concepts without compromising security and privacy. Some of the key features that we have build into Hiitch from web based technology are accessibility anywhere, portability of data, community interactions and etc. Desktop features that we have included are direct information delivery, GUI familiarity, security in terms of data storage and privacy of information.

We accept the fact that there will be people who will disagree with us but we also know that there will be other people who will like what we are doing. And we hope that our solution to social networking and online dating will not only meet their needs in this particular area but empower them to succeed in their social life online!