“Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.” - Herbert Hoover
*Gasp*
Phew, for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself.
What is Glow?
Over the last few weeks I’ve been frequently asked about Glow and what it is. Overall I’ve been somewhat vague in my response because I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted it characterized.
The simple fact is, Glow is my personal attempt at building a social network that doesn’t sacrifice simplicity, features or user-experience in an effort to promote decentralization, user privacy and data ownership.
While I understand there have been numerous attempts at achieving this very same goal (Diaspora, Status.net, OneSocialWeb, etc), I’ve decided to take a different approach; one I believe could act as a strong intermediate in moving us towards a truly open, interoperable, federated social web.
While I won’t get into the technical details just yet, I will say that Glow implements a hybrid architecture; a combination of centralization and decentralization. Glow also relies heavily on open standards and protocols like: Activity Streams, Salmon, PubSubHubbub and Portable Contacts.
Feature wise it’s a little of Twitter, a little of Facebook and few of my own ideas. Think real-time, follow-model, @mentions, likes, comments and private group messaging to start.
It’s also important to note that Glow is not something I currently plan to build a business around. If people find it interesting and useful, great, the architecture allows it to scale with little cost to me or the user (thanks Amazon free tier).
So if you’re interested in trying something a little different, feel free to head over to http://glow.io/ and get on the invite list. We’ll be rolling out the first set of invitations in the next two weeks.
