PEERSITE social market network

Peersite is a set of components to build a social market network

What is a "social market network"?

We have seen the explosion of social networks such as myspace, facebook, bebo, orkut and the rest. Peersite components let you build a social network like these, using Java technology, which gives you the security and scalability of Java. But that's just the social network side of things. In addition, peersite lets you track value between the components of a social network. Being Java based, everything on the social network is implemented as an object: members, groups ("friends" are just a special sort of group), shared resources such as pictures and music, and forum postings. All of these objects can have accounts attached to them - using the boox accounting core, and bits of value - typically, denominated in a site-specific pseudo-currency - can be transferred between them.

How does it work?

It's only alpha, so it doesn't - without a lot of java hacking. The "Pippin" interface must be implemented by objects having accounts. There's a BaseConsortium abstract class (which implements Pippin) which can be extended to provide multiple (shared) ownership of resources, either equally or in proportion.

What's in the project?

It's designed to be highly modular, and extensible. There are base modules providing the essential functionality (groups, payment, forums) etc and additional modules for more site-specific functionality, for example collaborating on works held in a Subversion repository, putting a payment layer on BitTorrent transfers so seeds get credited for the bandwidth they provide, and crediting music files.

Sounds cool - can I get it?

The first alpha release of Peersite-Basic was made on 2008-11-03, and is available here , and you can get anonymous access to the project Subversion repository and download even more bleeding-edge code. Neither the release nor the svn code are guaranteed even to compile (but the release did for us, and contains jars of bytecode as well as the source). Whichever version you use, please also sign up for the project mailing list, because documentation is still catching up and you'll certainly need to hook up with the developers to get it working. And do a lot of hacking yourself.