Private Microblogging/Twitter-like Service [closed]

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Are there any cloud based private Twitter-like services out there?

I am working for a client who needs a service like this implemented, but we don't have the time or budget to create one from scratch.

I am looking for something with a REST api where I can create an account on it from the master server, set an account to follow another account, post updates for accounts, and then get a feed of posts (sorted by date) from accounts that another account is following (like a facebook wall, or twitter feed). It would be great if it could automatically scale out to hundreds of thousands of users, with perhaps 50 000 daily posts being made.

I had thought about implementing this myself, but it seems like there are some tricky areas when it comes to having an account following a few thousand other accounts, or being followed by 10s of thousands of accounts, and generating the feed in somewhat realtime as posts come in.

I have found some services such as http://www.ning.com/ and http://www.socialengine.com/ but I'm not sure if they can do what I need, and they seem to be very focussed on having a website. This is for a mobile app so that is not required.

There are a few open source projects out there, but they would all require setting up/maintaining hosting (not a huge problem) and I'm not certain how scalable they are (the client requires it scale up to at least 100k users).

Answer 1

I'm sorry for the late reply. I hope it will be useful to others looking at this.

I had pretty much the exact same need as you, and ended up creating a full-featured solution after finding no other resources. The service is called Collabinate (http://www.collabinate.com). It provides a RESTful API that focuses on simplicity and ease of use, and currently leaves the UI completely up to you. It uses a graph database and algorithms in the backend, and scales quite well for your situation.

Answer 2

Maybe private team inbox can fit in your solution too... https://www.flowdock.com/

there is not a following feature in this but if this is an internal company need...

you can create chat rooms for departments and in general ... maybe the chat rooms can be the following feature for you

Answer 3

Looks like there isn't a good solution here.

I have found jaiku which looks incredibly complex and doesn't seem to run on the latest app engine sdk.

There is also diaspora which could be modified and run on your own server to do what is needed.

In the end, I have decided to just implement this myself on Google App Engine. It seems the best way to do what is needed. Using the fan-out pattern seems to be the best way. The Fantasm library seems to provide an easy to use way to do this, so I am going to try that.