OStatus interview with Tyler Gillies

Today's interviewee for the OStatus interview is Tyler Gillies, the resident hacker at ReadWriteWeb.com.

Give us an overview of your software. What is it, and what does it do?

Tyler: I've been using StatusNet since the first day identi.ca was released. You can find me at Tyler or tjgillies.

My first implementation of OStatus was robin. You can find it at robin. It is a rails based app that implements all the main features of status.net (webfinger/salmon/pubsubhubbub, etc), however, it is not currently being actively maintained. Please feel free to fork and commit patches. I have a plan to re-implement robin using "upgraded" technology, probably nodejs and redis.

Why did you decide to implement social web federation?

Tyler: I chose to pick social web federation because I only had two choices. Either federate, or don't. I didn't want to live in a walled garden. (I own http://opengard.in)

What problems did you have?

Tyler: Honestly, the specs on salmon are a little weird, and it was frustrating back then, because status.net, me and cliqset.com were the only ones who actually had a working implementation of salmon, so there wasn't a big support community. Also the documentation for the ruby ssl library is almost non existent.

How can users try out OStatus in your software?

Tyler: I don't currently have a website up running robin, but if they are familiar with rails, they can download it and try to get it running themselves. I am currently working on a location based app that will probably end up using OStatus to federate messages.

Check out geoloqi, I am developing the nodejs server.

- Tyler

Over the next couple of weeks there will be more OStatus interviews posted right here, so stay tuned!