Atomique

I have spent the last six months in Santiago de Chile at the Web Research Center doing an internship about distributed social software with Javier Velasco as one of my supervisors. Both of us are aficionados of photography while being also interested in usability and social aspects of the web. With Javier’s support i have designed and developed a software that enables photo sharing via groups in a decentralized and distributed manner. This is an attempt to create a decentral, open source alternative to sites like Flickr and Fotolog trying to create open standards and protocols for social interaction on the web. This approach will be covered in more detail in the internship thesis i am about to write during the next weeks and months.

While Atomique is still pre-alpha it has already some basic functionalities like tagging, comments, RSS, and the mentioned groups feature. Check out the demo sites of Andrea and Lisa. If you also wish to login acting as a host you need to enter the subdomain as the user and test as the password. Please don’t try to break it. It still is very edgy.

As there is still a long way to go you are happily invited to help out. In the next days i will setup the necessary infrastructure to turn Atomique into an open source project and continue development. You can find more information in the wiki and via this weblog all news regarding Atomique will be published. Stay tuned and please share your opinion.

Thanks to anybody who already has helped a lot by giving advice or interviews, doing paper prototype tests or listening to presentations in poor Spanish.