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!

We have been discussing among ourselves about open sourcing Hiitch for a while now. When we say open source Hiitch, we mean both the server and the client code. A totally complete and open desktop social networking platform that others can use, extend, customize and redistribute on their own. Can open source really help us compete or is it the end of us? We have only recently come to an agreement that open source is an option that we will seriously consider in the near future. We have put into Hiitch our heart & soul and we are unsure if open source is a right move at this stage.

Why do we want to open source Hiitch?

• We envision Hiitch to become a free but personal social networking platform that everyone will use to meet new friends and stay connected. No barriers!
• We want to move the development fast enough to challenge the current market players and existing technologies.
• We desire a vibrant development community that will keep innovating with us.

Our biggest problem now is that we do not have the financial resources to fulfill all or any of the above goals. My argument for open source is that we can allow others to build smaller networks of their immediate social circle and then build software to connect these smaller social networks together to form a mega network of independent networking peers. We can achieve this with little or no cost at all using open source approaches. The open source community has already shown that the last two points is workable so I will not elaborate more on it.

What are our fears of open sourcing Hiitch?

• It scares away potential investors and greatly reduces our value as a commercial company.
• The open source community do not see a need for such a product and hence no vibrant development community.

The worse thing to happen is that we cannot financially support ourselves to innovate and develop ground breaking software for the social networking messes. Merely selling value added services on top of a free software platform is also not an easy approach. We also worry that a geek community cannot attract enough normal average users for which a life style application like Hiitch is build for.

Feel free to share your views with us on this matter.