Rizzoma

[jducoeur]

I shared this on FB a few hours ago, because it was the easiest way to do so, but folks here might be interested: I just came across Rizzoma, which is essentially an open-source successor to Google Wave. Still in fairly early beta and somewhat limited, but good to see -- if they can do a good job, it might reduce my sense of needing to try the CommYou project again. They seem to be focusing in on the collaborative-project use cases: not really where my focus for CommYou was, but probably a savvy analysis of the sweet spot of the Wave-style features.

It currently requires a Google ID to log in (like CommYou, they seem to be working with other peoples' social networks instead of trying to build their own), and currently requires Chrome to use, although both of those are on their roadmap to widen.

I've created a sandbox thread to play in. Y'all are welcome to come noodle around in it, and we can collectively get an idea of what the feature set currently looks like...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Their Google login requests permission to manage my contacts...

That seems a little dirty...

[jducoeur]

It's discussed in their blog, actually -- others have made this point. It sounds like the "manage contacts" permission is necessary to access the contacts list, which is necessary to bootstrap something like this. (One of Wave's killer flaws was its lack of integration with a real social network.) They claim that they aren't even storing a copy of the list; whether you trust in that or not, I can't say.

Refactoring things to make this optional (which I suspect will disable a feature or two) is reportedly on their roadmap, but they want to tackle it as part of generally refactoring the social-network integration. They've done some polling about it, and it squicks enough people that they are planning to deal with it, though.

Unfortunately, Google+ has the same permissions-granting model that is becoming so common nowadays, where you have to agree to a bundle of poorly-titled permissions in order to do anything interesting. They could really use some transparency there, and maybe some finer-grained permissions. What Rizzoma wants, it sounds like, is mainly read access, but it sounds like the properly tight permission isn't available yet...

A request for help

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I had not dug into their blog. Too busy with my "main project", which you know about.

Permissions granularity is a tricksy affair: my last professional project had SO MANY such permissions that almost no one could navigate them meaningfully. And, as you (and obviously they) point out, even if you grant people permissions to read data, there is an obvious issue with the degree of trust over use and storage.

It would certainly be nice if that permission was orthogonal, at least during the dating/getting-to-know-you period. We've all learned a lot from Farmville.... :-)

Anyway, given my main situation, I'll likely not circle back to them until later. Unless something else claims my interests first. (The damned planet is trying to make me ADHD, with its proliferation of shiny objects.)