

Asking HN for feedback: Conn'r - An easy, cross-network, communication framework - antileet

Dear HN Community,<p>I've been writing an open source framework which will allow a developer to write an application that allows realtime data exchange with <i>all</i> of your social network contacts.<p>Connr is an open source platform to allow developers to build applications that allow users to exchange realtime information freely between a user‘s client and all the other social contacts from existing social networks - thereby making the humble sign up form redundant.<p>Users of a connr based client can exchange data as long as they share a common link on atleast one of the many (extendable) supported social networks. This library is being written to prevent companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to have sole control over being able to write social applications that use their friend graph. With Connr - anyone can write an application that works out of the box with all social networks.<p>The concept is very simple - find all common links by matching lists of friends across networks and use XMPP to handle the communication. But we hope to abstract the functionality enough to make development easy.<p>We are two Indian undergrads working on this project and need feedback from the developers of various social applications,<p>You can see a rough diagram of what we have in mind here: http://anirudhsanjeev.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/connr2.png<p>Or read my initial write-up here, with some more details:
http://anirudhsanjeev.org/project-connr-easy-open-cross-network-communication-framework/<p>I have an immense respect for the insight and experience of the HN Community and would really appreciate your advice and feedback.<p>Thank you.
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growt
I think you'll have a lot of tedious work ahead of you but if you succeed it
will definitely be a useful thing. But keep an eye on the TOS of the different
services, they might cause you trouble. And if you ever release something,
please name your releases "John" & "Sarah" :)

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antileet
Hi,

One thing that we were worried about and need advice on is who owns the
semantic connections, though all networks have some workaround to get the
connections. In essence, the data on who is related to who is data,
nonetheless, and we wanted to know what licenses it follows.

Thanks,

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jbn92
"conn'r" pronounced the american way will sound like "connard" to French ears,
which means "asshole". Doesn't sound like such a good name to me...

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antileet
Oh my! Thank you for pointing that out. Any other suggestions for a name? :)

