What seems like a long time ago but is really less than two and a half years I went down to Pasadena for one of the first Ruby on Rails classes from Mike Clark and Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Studios. While there I met Michael Hartl, at the time working as a consultant at CalTech and IdeaLab but interested in doing his own thing soon.
We kept in touch and I was very happy last Summer when the book he co-authored, RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails, came out.
Michael and his good friend Long Nguyen continued working the book’s ideas on social networking and in December were selected to participate in the Winter 2008 Y Combinator program for startups.
Insoshi is the product they’re creating. The vision is to create a complete open source social networking platform, a Facebook in a box to put it crudely. The programming language is Ruby on Rails running against MySQL or SQLite by default; Rails has taken a bit of a battering in the last few months but for certain types of web apps (including this one!) I think it’s still a great choice.
At this stage, less than two months after the initial developer release, Insoshi is very basic: profiles, friends, private messaging, forums, blogs, activity and mini feeds. Even so the structure is solid, with a strong application design, and Long and Michael are clear about the feature roadmap while remaining very open to community feedback.
I’ve set up a development instance and hope to contribute some user experience improvements based on what I’ve learned from Glen Lipka, Marketo’s guru. The co-creators, by their own admission, are much better at coding than UX/UI so this seems like a good area for me to add value.
BillSaysThis 