A platform for a self-hosted "lifestream"

Jun 2, 2010 15:24 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has been looking beyond the traditional browser for quite a while now and its experimental arm, Mozilla Labs, has been fostering several projects having to do with the social web and the way the browser is a tool to manage your online identity. Mozilla Labs has now launched a new project, which is as far from the organization’s roots as it gets, sudoSocial. The project aims to enable users to create and manage a self-hosted ‘lifestream’ to pull data from all their online ‘homes.’

“sudoSocial is a new experiment in the Mozilla Labs Concept Series aiming to build a stream publishing platform, suitable for a profile page server,” sudoSocial’s developer, Mozilla Labs’ Austin King, wrote.

“Long term sudoSocial would be suitable for curating any stream of content, but as we want to get this into your hands very early in the process, the initial release is rather sparse. The system has enough functionality to kick off the discussion and get you hacking on your own personal homepage replacement with just a little CSS, JavaScript or Processing.js,” he explained.

The idea behind it is pretty simple and solid. sudoSocial enables users to aggregate feeds, posts and other content they create and publish online. All this data would be pulled together and published in a stream on the user’s homepage. The point is to give them control and ownership of their data, something that is somewhat at a premium online these days. The name, inspired by the Linux command ‘sudo,’ which enables regular users to run programs or commands with elevated privileges, says it all.

Right now, sudoSocial is in the very early stages. It’s not really suited for the everyday users and requires a bit of skills to set up. It doesn’t really do that much anyway, but the purpose of this early release is to get things in motion. The hope is to have developers interested in the project and the idea and then elaborate from there.