Plexus is the Personal * Portable * Private social graph which both listens to and shares your social message stream.
Plexus is a free and open source software ‘switchboard’ which handles all of your social networking needs.
In May 2010, when I announced my decision to ‘quit’ Facebook – because of a number of concerns ranging from privacy to duty of care – I created a Posterous account, so that I could continue to share media with my friends. What I found, repeatedly, was that my Facebook connections objected to having to go somewhere else to ‘check’ some other data source to stay in touch with their friends. Facebook provides a centralized way to keep track of everyone’s comings and goings – and as more people join Facebook, the ‘network effect’ grows, and that list of comings and goings becomes longer and more potent.
The important thing is the meeting point – the plexus – that brings someone together with everyone they’re trying to keep track of. This function is performed by Facebook – to a certain degree. What we all really need is a generalized and open solution to this problem, one which is personal, private and portable, so it can go anywhere we go, and be fit precisely to our particular needs.
This is the problem that Plexus solves, a problem we didn’t even know we had until just a few months ago, when the number of sources of social information suddenly exploded. It’s not just Facebook, but Twitter and Flickr and Foursquare and LinkedIn and Delicious and Posterous and WordPress and LiveJournal and on and on and on. People are coming up with great ideas for social sharing every day. We need a way to manage that. Plexus does.
On 26 June 2010, at PyCon AU, I introduced the Plexus architecture and a demo to a crowd of 150. You can read the transcript here, or play with the demo here.
If current plans hold (and they are), there should be a prototype release of Plexus around the 15th of September. We need your help!
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Fantastic Key Note by Mark at PyCon 2010 Sydney. This idea of Plexus has my interest boiling as I dearly want to get off Facebook but have found nothing coparitable enough to take it’s place, till hearing of Plexus.
Will be watching Mark’s tweets to when the day comes it is released to allow the public to open a Plexus account.
Hi, While I have thought that you are being a bit overly paranoid in your rational, I think that the goals and aims of this project are superb. So as someone who would count myslef as a user I have a few points to make which I hope, if addressed, would make this a very much better system.
You mention that there are many sources of information, and I for one find these multiple sources all a bit anoying. So tying them together is good. But I also have mutliple access methods, be they an iPhone, a home computer, a work computer, maybe a friends computer or one in an internet cafe somewhere.
I would like a system that works accross all of these environments and looks to me like the same thing. I get this at the moment say with twitter apps and web sites for a single application.
A bit of paranoia in the defense of personal liberty is not a vice.
@admin …and excessive trust in closed social networks, no virtue.
Interesting idea. It reminds me a lot of the openfeed concept that we have at Onesocialweb: creating an event-drive messaging bus interconnecting your social graph and social applications.
Have a look here, maybe you’ll pick some ideas out of it:
http://wiki.github.com/onesocialweb/osw-openfire-plugin/the-open-feed-concept
Laurent
I am just wondering when Plexus is going to ready to use Mark?
Hello Mr Pesce, Plexus seems to be one of quite a few takes on the problem of quitting the silos without leaving your friends. I wish to point you to the Mine! Project, worked on in London by Adriana Lukas and Alec Muffett, et al. Find it here: http://themineproject.org. There just might be reciprocal inspiration.
last blog update is from Mar 2010, has the development/inspiration stalled on Mine?
I know what Plexus is, I’m just waiting patietly to see Mr Pesce finish this wonderful invention.
@Leho Kraav: No, development at the mine! has not stalled. But it is going slower than desired at the moment.
@Matthias: thanks for the update. https://code.google.com/feeds/p/pymine/updates/basic shows last update Apr 8th. is there more up to date code somewhere else or…?
Interesting concept, is Plexus. I first heard about it during the (somewhat controversial) keynote at linux.conf.au.
A thought though…
Some of these Facebook users claim that it’s too hard (manually) going to another site. Have they not heard of RSS? Live bookmarks? They can add the RSS feeds of any number of sites to an RSS aggregator, many of which come built into browsers, and then their browser becomes the place they go.
Many blogs have a facility for adding friends’ blogs to a blogroll, and publicly displaying this information, that is, if you so choose to reveal your social graph.
It would appear from my observations that many of the features of Facebook are already provided by technologies that predate it. Is there something else that I’ve missed in this?