rabble
I just met a guy responsable for this rabble project. It’s a closed application that works on cellphones. It allows for blogging, reading blogs, creating calendar events, and associating profiles with locations. The location-based stuff is all manual (user-submitted type stuff), but that will change as the mobile companies allow it.
It also publishes to livejournal, blogger, etc, but it’s really conceived as a closed system to be used with other subscribers on the system. They even have some neat searches for stuff in your area (setting a radius) that weighs keywords in other peoples profiles and stuff.
It’s weird to see something that I’ve thought so much about, being done in exactly in the way I don’t want it done. Still, it will probably make them a lot of money.
mobileactive
September 23rd, 2005 at 7:48 pm
“You’re still blogging from your PC? That’s so last year.”
Jez, it sounds so… end of the 90’s :)
September 24th, 2005 at 7:54 am
ha!
September 29th, 2005 at 11:44 am
When you say exactly in the way you don’t want it done what do you mean?
From a closed perspective that’s purely a function of what the carriers allow.
Derrick
September 29th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
hey derrick,
I’m don’t mean to slag your stuff. I bet 1)it’s going to be a successful service, 2) I would probably love using it if there were sufficient users in Montreal, and 3) it might not have been possible to build according to a different model.
What I’m referring to is that it’s not conceived as a piece of the web ecology. it is not small pieces loosely joined. It is conceived of as a closed service which allows posting to several other blogging services.
For example - I’m at http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/ right now. We’re looking at building some of the functionality that you currently have, but the pieces of the puzzle we’re concerned about are openID, http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfcal/ , etc.
A project for $$ has very different results than projects not done for $$. that’s all.
good luck :-)
September 30th, 2005 at 11:28 am
I appreciate the feedback. Actually I am a big web ecology fan as well. Mobile is different. At least in it’s current state. Development around J2ME and BREW is something that doesn’t lend itself well to things you can do on the web. Simply put, the PC is a much more powerful tool with different use cases. When you combine the handset limitations with the closed carrier network, you have an interesting problem to solve albeit not one that is similar to much of the web world. Of course that will change and as it starts to do so you will see what we do morph as well.
Cheers!
Derrick
October 2nd, 2005 at 9:43 pm
well, I might have been hasty in my judgement - but I was asking you in what ways it could work outside the system. After my last comment I was wondering if I had made an error and I was thinking that I have no idea about developping on that framework.
All the same, it’s hard to believe that a service like yours would really spend too much time worrying about fitting into web ecology for it’s own sake. Introducing profit into social networking systems makes them want to close certain things up - almost inevitably as far as i’ve seen. All the same, I think your product/service is exciting in how it’s attempting to create community.
Thanks for the discussion.