I’ve been experimenting with the Tent protocol. Tent is a protocol for distributed social networking. It’s sort of like the WordPress of social networks. It provides a way to share status updates, photos, and blog entries without going through Facebook or Twitter. You can host your own server, or use someone else’s. Here is my profile on tent.is (currently the largest tent server).
The code I’ve been writing builds on the work of Jonathan Rudenberg – one of Tent’s inventors.
1. Featbeat, my open source quantified self platform will now post to tent every gram of protein that I eat. And, a “nike poller” app, posts every step that I take.
I pulled out just the necessary code for a rails based tent app (mostly this was a conversion of tent-status to a rails & devise based app. This is where you should start if you’re looking to build a tent app with rails. It shows how to use Tent for authentication, and post a status message.
What’s next? Eventually I envision Featbeat storing its updates in a new Tent format specifically tailored to quantified self style updates. I don’t plan to annoy everyone with the amount of protein I’ve eaten forever. My end goal is to use the tent prototocol as an open source quantified self platform. Users will be able to connect different sensors to the network, and own whatever data they log (either by hosting their own server, or because tent allows data import & export).