Why don't you build it first and if it gets popular then ask for donations?
What about the open source projects you're building on top of? Are you going to give any of those programmers some money?
> Yes. We're starting with the critical bit - the client - out in the open in JS w/ off-the-shelf open-source. Needs many eyes.
Frankly, I'm sick of people jumping on the "open-source" bandwagon and diverting resources from those who truly deserve it or who have a track record in the field they are asking funds for.
You know, people like Stallman and Torvalds took risk and bore the opportunity cost of spending time to build things they believed in and had passion for.
It seems too many of todays entrepreneurs are afraid of taking risk and want to pass it onto the public. I especially dislike what App.net did, conning people into giving money to build a closed source platform and then selling part of that company to venture capitalists.
Should be much quicker to develop a common library for use by the server and a (webstart) client - than to do two separate implementations? Also some of the code (and most of the interfaces) could probably be used on Android as well.
If you are doing javascript wouldn't nodejs on the server make sense?
We'll make a reference implementation, but we want and need many providers to experiment with price points and service options.
More importantly, anyone can roll-their-own provider on their server.
The intent is to extend an existing standard, RSS, with an http protocol to support it. We need to one of many providers for the system to work as intended.
Many open source software projects (some huge ones today) came out of the woodwork with no funding and little community support.
But I get your point, it will need some marketing to get people to understand what it is all about. But it's not like we knew what Twitter was at first. Did we?
No, you don't. It's not a matter of understanding the meaning, it's a matter of pronunciation.
That said, the architecture supports not only Twitter but FB-style friending and private group shares; we want to encourage different clients in different form factors, with the advantage being that they'd all interop. No more siloes.
It's an idea terrible enough that it will make people doubt your competence. For me, personally, "building strong crypto" and "lifting the twitter UI because too lazy to whip up some visualization of a simple roadmap" don't go together.
A hand-drawn sketch of the planned UI would look less vaporwarey.
What it stands for anyway?
But since you bring up, Facebook and Twitter are way better names.
IMHO it is not a good name because: * Not obvious at first glance that means 'trust' * How do you pronounce that? just say 'trust', spell it or try to say it in some bizarre way with a mute 't'? * Doesn't look pretty
For me the only good thing about the name is that is unique.
