Today I discovered that Laurent Eschenauer & Alard Weisscher, co-founders of the popular Storytlr Lifestreaming service, have embarked on a very ambitious new project. Storytlr ceased development and was released as open source last December and today we apparently find out why. They’ve now taken on a much larger problem of building a ” free, open, and decentralized social networking platform” called One Social Web.

Here’s their description

The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration.

I read a little further to find out that this project is an initiative of Vodafone Group Research and Development which you can learn about more from the link. Laurent and Alard have also  stated that they are very much open to suggestion and feedback from anyone that wants to contribute to this project. My guess is that with their proven track record and the fact that this platform is being built around other open initiatives such as Activity Streams, portablecontacts, OAuth, OpenSocial, FOAF, XRDS, OpenID, and others, they should receive some good support.

Communicating across the disjointed social web is the problem One Social Web is trying to solve

When I think about how this system would work I look back at how SocialThing did things like where they would import activity from your friends from the sources of the social media services they lived on and allowed you to interact with them without requiring them to join SocialThing. I always liked that approach which nobody since then has tried to emulate and now it appears we have a new initiative aiming to bring us just that with open standards to boot.

On the day after Google announces Buzz and yet another social network we need to pay attention to I’m looking forward to watching the progress of One Social Web to create a decentralized and federated way of helping us connect the dots and make things easier to manage instead of adding to the pile.

They plan on the first release of the code to happen in March. You can learn much more about this project by visiting their site and viewing some of the materials I’ve embedded below.

Why One Social Web?

Screencast of Web Client

FOSDEM 2010 Presentation

I’ve been seeing quite a few Storytlr sites pop up now that the code has been released as open source. Ars Technica who like the service and had written about it in the past decided to write a post with details of the open source release along with setup information. The post was written by Ryan Paul and he even goes into some of the basics about Lifestreaming and offers up some alternatives to Storytlr.

From the post

The code, which is available under the Apache license, is written in PHP and uses the Zend framework. It’s not a masterpiece of modern software, but it’s reasonably well-written and relatively easy to customize. Storytlr has some intriguing features, but it never seemed all that compelling to me as a hosted service—just another place on the Internet to accumulate my crap. As an open source project, however, it’s a whole lot more interesting because now users can deploy it on any infrastructure and extend it by adding support for additional services.

via Ars Technica Make your own lifestream with open source Storytlr

I’ve seen a few folks talking about having setup the newly released open source version of Storytlr on their own servers. Pretty cool to start seeing what is surely the beginning of many more of these popping up.

I mentioned in October that Storytlr was shutting down and would be releasing their software as open source. In a blog post on Sunday they announced the initial release with plans to continue working towards a stable 1.0 release over the next few weeks.  Of note is that they released it under an Apache 2 license which means it’s non-restrictive and can be used for commercial endeavors. You can download the code now via Google Code here.

I  echo the sentiments Christina Warren at Mashable wrote yesterday about the release.

The shuttering of hosted services is just one of those things that happens on the Internet. We like that StoryTlr gave its users advanced notice, made it easy to export their existing data and have now open sourced the platform so that individuals can build their own copies or even extend the idea.

via Mashable | Lifestreaming Project StoryTlr Goes Open Source.

In a blog post on October 10th the team at Storytlr let users know that they will be shutting down the service at the end of this year. It’s just another casualty in a long list of Lifestreaming services that have shut down over the last year.

On shutting down…from their blog post

The reason is simple: our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don’t have time anymore to operate this service properly…We have spent the last months looking for alternatives, potential partners, and even thought about creating a startup around this project. Yet, in the end, nothing did really make sense for us and we have decided to pull the plug. It was a tough decision to make, it is a sad day, and we feel sorry for our passionate users who have put so much effort into their page and who have helped us improve the service through their many comments.

It’s a bummer because I felt Storytlr was one of the top personal Lifestreaming services out there. They especially excelled in offering very similar functionality to running a self-hosted Wordpress blog. The silver lining in their decision is that they’ve decided to open source the platform. Also, unlike the shutdown of Swurl which gave no warning when they pulled the plug, they are offering several backup options. They already provided the ability to export CSV files of your data. In addition to that they will make available a way to download all of your binary files that have been uploaded as a zip file. They’ve also created a Google Group to discuss issues moving forward. I applaud them for both helping their users and now providing their platform for the benefit of others. This is definitely a great service that will be missed. I wish both Laurent & Alard the best.

Here are the posts I wrote about Storytlr here on Lifestream Blog

• New Service Storytlr Offers Lifestreaming With a Few Twists
• Watch the US Airways Plane Crash Unfold in a Lifestream
• Storytlr Continues to Impress with a Batch of New Features
• Storytlr Continues Evolution by Adding Pages and Mediastreams

[Note: at the time of this post I had trouble both visiting the Storytlr site as well as the blog post. Hopefully things will be online again soon]