grabbit's sandbox: Grabbit

Hi! We're excited to be making Grabbit an open source project. We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and a couple years building a new platform for social networking, that rides on top of other social networks. In one sense it's a social meta-network. But wait, there's more! A lot more! Click on "Read more" to get more info about the Grabbit platform. We'll be posting a screencast demo soon!

Grabbit is a robust social media platform that is integrated with Drupal. The source code for the Grabbit project is maintained on github, and the project site is grabbit.org, where you can find more information, contact us, or access the source code repository.. The current beta .90 version of Grabbit is built using Drupal 6.x, and we also integrated Pressflow 6.15 into this version to increase performance. The current version supports Amazon's elastic cloud services, including their RDS cloud database.

Our plan is to migrate to Drupal 7 before the first main release, and support more databases. Drupal 7 allows for a data abstraction layer, so we hope to be able to use that to support a number of different databases (such as hadoop and couchDB), or even the use of multiple databases for certain parts of the system to optimize both cost and performance of large-scale installations. Another objective is to be able to use cloud-to-cloud (the ultimate peer-to-peer) so that various Grabbit communities can join together to form a larger interconnected meta-network.

We are currently looking for other members of the drupal community, PHP'ers, designers, documentation writers, and anyone else that would be interested in helping work on this cool project. If that could be you, then please contact us using the Contact menu. Thanks!

Project Overview

Grabbit goes beyond other open source social networking projects such as diaspora, Yammer, Chatter, Ning, etc. to provide an open social network with it's own community of Grabbit users, that is layered on top of all the other major social networks. This meta-network approach allows the creation of independent social communities that can leverage the existing social networks and social graph. It also allows each user to take ownership of their data, and independently saves your social, news, and other streams for as long as you want in a secure drupal environment. And you can even add Grabbit components to your website to tie it not just to Grabbit but to the social graphs (such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.) of all the Grabbit users to more fully utilize social networking and social media on your site.

Grabbit is a web-based application that provides users with a rich “stream browser” that helps with tasks such as stream aggregation, content filtering, friend management, and more. Grabbit gives users access to personalized streams from Twitter, Facebook, news, blogs, email and other content sources any place, anytime. Grabbit is designed so that it can run on smart phones (iPhone, Palm Pre, Android), the web, and TV to provide an integrated multi-platform system that allows people to view, send/receive, and manage ongoing real-time updates and alerts across a wide range of social networks, information, media, and commerce.

Grabbit leverages the major trend of people spending significantly more of their attention on real-time online streams of short or summarized information, as opposed to traditional media. More and more information from the web is being streamed to users in real-time. Social services such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, and a host of others stream realtime updates to people. But, more than just social networks are delivering real-time streams of information. Smart mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android, and iPad has created a bumper crop of applications that deliver summarized real-time information.

The massive popularity of receiving and sending small amounts of information is indicative of today’s “short attention span society” in which there is more competition for an individual’s attention than ever before. Delivering summarized information in real-time streams helps people cope with the massive amounts of information available, and the resultant information overload. The real-time nature of streaming services offers an immediacy that is appealing and attention-grabbing. For many people, real-time streams are the “new” news.

But the popularity of these real-time streaming message services has created some new problems: keeping track of all of these real-time streams, and keeping track of friends and associates on various social and business networks. It’s inconvenient to have to check all these streams individually, for example, logging into Twitter or using a Twitter app to participate in the Twitter stream, and then having to do the same for Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. It’s also difficult to keep track of and manage various friends who may be on one or more of these social networks or other online services. Furthermore, all the messages create a lot of “noise” and it is difficult to find and focus on what is most interesting and important.

Grabbit solves these problems, and more. Grabbit aggregates all of their social network streams into a single stream of your realtime information and communications. Grabbit  consolidates many different types of streams, but also helps users with tasks such as managing alerts, messages, friends, and subscriptions. Grabbit gives users the ability to add many different types of real-time streams, updates, and alerts – e.g. email alerts, news alerts, blog alerts, alarms and reminders, shopping alerts, and more – across a broad range of social networks, information, media, and commerce.

Because aggregating all of that information into a single stream could create its own information overload, Grabbit lets users instantly filter their streams in a variety of ways to focus on specific information or people. Grabbit also gives users a powerful set of tools for managing friends, contacts, and groups of friends and other contacts, across a wide variety of social and business networks.

Grabbit helps users send and receive real-time messages and updates to and from people in any of their social networks, as well as receive and forward updates from a wide range of information sources including:

• Social networks: Grabbit imports friends and aggregates updates from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Flickr, Groupon, etc., and lets users manage both their updates and friends

• Email: users can get alerts when they receive new mail, and can filter alerts by sender or keywords

• News: Grabbit provides a “personalized news stand” where users can discover and subscribe to a large number of news sources from major news outlets to special interest news, and filter news by keywords, news sources, etc.

• RSS/Atom feeds: Grabbit users can subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed, get a summary delivered to the user’s Grabbit stream, and then link to the full content

• Blog updates: Grabbit can notify users when a favorite blog has a new post, and provide a summary

• Alarms/Reminders: users can program alarms and reminders to appear in their Grabbit stream at specified times

• Shopping alerts: users can get notifications from Groupon, Living Social, eBay, Craigslist, etc

Grabbit is designed to be multi-platform and available anywhere, any time, on your phone, the web, or TV. Grabbit will be offered in the following formats:

• Smart phones: an application for smart phones, initially the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android. Other phones will be supported via a dynamic web interface for the phone’s browser

• Web site: the Grabbit web site will provide the easiest way for users to perform advanced tasks such as creating filters for feeds and emails, importing contacts, organizing friends into groups, etc.

• Grabbit stream web widget: allows users to place their customized Grabbit stream on almost any website

• Grabbit deals web widget: Allows users to place a widget on any web page to offer deals from the Grabbit real-time direct marketing system based on specific keywords, meta tags, or content related to that page

• TV: Designed to work on gaming platforms such as Wii, Xbox, and PS3. Eventually a version for set-top boxes will be developed as that market develops

Of course this is just part of the the current plan, and we are hoping that by making Grabbit open source the community will help extend, enhance, and refine the Grabbit platform. We will be posting additional documentation and other information to help understand the full scope of the platform. We hope you find Grabbit as cool as we do!