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.

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.

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.

Nope it is not our birthday but the launch of Hiitch beta. After several months of private testing, we have decided that it is time to show the world our baby software. Hiitch is a desktop software that notifies almost anything that interest you. It is also a social networking software that securely connects you with your friends and loved ones.

Do bear with our current short commings as you journey with us. We promised that our services will get better as we go along. Go ahead and download a copy for yourself.

Hiitch Pte Ltd is looking for investors who has/have the same vision as us and is/are willing to join efforts with us to establish the next generation social network. We have not been seriously looking for investment up until now. The main reason that we are starting to look for investment is because we realize that Hiitch needs the financing to expand faster to level the odds with our competition.

Hear Us Out!

You may think that on-line social networking is almost over with huge domination from companies such as MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Bebo and etc. However, we think otherwise! On-line social networking is far from being over but just beginning. There are lots of areas in this field itself that has not been researched and explored but has great value. Communication tools aside, many of these existing services only allows you to place a profile and wait for things to happen. We classify these services as hit and run because of the way they encourage their users to relate to each other. But we envision Hiitch to be far from these hit and run services.

Hiitch is about researching and exploring at real time:
- new ways for you to meet people of your interest.
- new ways for you to widen your social circle.
- new ways to tract your relationships with others.
- new ways for you to find deals and opportunities.
- etc…

All our work is centered around the context of a personalized community in the space of a larger social network. Work in these areas have huge implications not just for the average net-citizen but also for businesses, organizations and etc.

Drop us a mail or contact us directly if you have interest in investing on what we are doing.