“Well you want to monitor changes of your system config. You want to be able to revert them and you don’t want to care about this when you do something.”

I really liked this and thinks its so useful and a smart idea that I wanted to share it with you. Just keep in mind that you don’t push the git repository to some public space since the config files might include a lot of passwords. Also look out for his .gitignore in his case the printer does a lot of automatic changes and is thus ignored. You might have similar settings for your configs.
I hope sharing this was useful for you!

• Response times for requests are usually less than 10 milliseconds (+network i/o e.g. TCP round trips coming from HTTP)
• The Graphity News Stream Server is a free open source software (GPLv3) and hosted in the metalcon git repository. (Please also use the bug tracker there to submit bugs and feature requests)
• It is running two Graphity algorithms: One is read optimized and the other one is write optimized, if you expect your application to have more write than read requests.
• The server comes with an REST API which makes it easy to hang in the server in whatever application you have.
• The server’s response also follows the activitystrea.ms format so out of the box there are a large amount of clients available to render the response of the server.
• The server ships together with unit tests and extensive documentation especially of the news stream server protocol (NSSP) which specifies how to talk to the server. The server can currently handle about 100 write requests in medium size (about a million nodes) networks. I do not recommend to use this server if you expect your user base to grow beyond 10 Mio. users (though we are working to get the server scaling) This is mostly due to the fact that our data base right now won’t really scale beyond one machine and some internal stuff has to be handled synchronized.

Koding.com is currently thinking to implement Graphity like algorithms to power their activity streams. It was for Richard from their team who pointed out in a very fruitfull discussion how to avoid the neo4j limit of 2^15 = 32768 relationship types by using an overlay network. So his ideas of an overlay network have been implemented in the read optimized graphity algorithm. Big thanks to him!
Now I am relly excited to see what kind of applications you will build when using Graphity.

If you’ll use graphity

Please tell me if you start using Graphity, that would be awesome to know and I will most certainly include you to a list of testimonials.
By they way if you want to help spreading the server (which is also good for you since more developer using it means higher chance to get newer versions) you can vote up my answer in stack overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202198/whats-the-best-manner-of-implementing-a-social-activity-stream/13171306#13171306

How to get started

its darn simple!

1. You clone the git repository or get hold of the souce code.
2. then switch to the repo and type sudo ./install.sh
3. copy the war file to your tomcat webapps folder (if you don’t know how to setup tomcat and maven which are needed we have a detailed setup guide)
4. and you’re done more configuration details are in our README.md!
5. look in the newswidget folder to find a simple html / java script client which can interact with the server.

Get involved

There are plenty ways to get involved:

• Fork the server
• commit some bug report
• Fix a bug
• Subscribe to the mailing list.

Furhter links:

• git repository
• originial graphity blogpost
• graphity paper
• Stack overflow discussion on social activity streams (for voting thanks!)
• issue tracker

What do you expect from a social networking site and for what reasons would you use it?

We have already created a small list at:
https://github.com/renepickhardt/metalcon/wiki/requirementsBand
which I am sharing here and asking musicians to contribute to. Eather here in the comment section or via the github wiki. Thanks a lot

Self promotion

Bands want to advertise their music and get a lot of attation.

Music hosting

Bands often lack technical knowledge to host their music. Metalcon can provide them with the functionality to host promotional songs and also share the player on other websites and with other services.

Control

The worst that could happen to a band is that they spend a lot of effort building up their fan base on a social networking site like they did in the early 2000s and then the site becomes irrelevant. Similar problems hold with facebook where page owners nowadays have to pay money to get their message spread to everybody who liked the fan page.

Therefore a requirement for musicians is to keep control of their fan base that they have grown so far.

Contact with fans and Streetteam

Bands want contact to their most important fans and to people who can organize stuff for them. Heaving a streetteam is essential to the sucess of many bands. Using a social networking service can help the band to fulfill their goal

Privacy

Famous musicians want to use the band profil of a social networking site without revealing their private account.

Staying in contact with other industry players

Musicians might want to stay in contact with partners from

• labels
• booking agencies
• promoters
• photographers
• video producers
• music producers
• venue owners
• …

Sell products

Bands want the possibility to sell

• Tickets
• Merchandise
• Music (MP3 and CD)

Booking

Bands want to get the opportunity to book gigs. Giving them the opportunity to get in contact with bookers will help them.

release Management

Bands often have a complete produced record. This should be shared with some players from the industry. In this process the music should be

• hosted in the web
• watermarked (to prevent leaking)
• shared privately with selected partners
• only be streamed from the web