Now in the third year, we have to do a PHP-project. We could have done the boring stuff with the rest of the class, but we are both advanced in PHP-coding (or do at least think we are in my case...) so we decided to do something else.
The idea behind MsgHub is the following:
People are using a lot of tools and services for communication nowadays like Twitter, Facebook, E-Mail, instant messaging, sms, phone,...
Nevertheless, or maybe because of that, it is sometimes hard to contact someone if you need something instantly. How can you reach someone? Has he turned his mobile on? Would it be faster if he could type an email? Is he at home and twittering anyway?
By contacting someone only on one channel you are risking that you will have to wait for an answer for some time. But writing on all channels would consume a huge amount of time and maybe you also don't know all the channels of a particular person.
The idea is, that MsgHub will solve this problem. We won't create a new channel for communication, but an interface for broadcasting messages to a particular person.
Everyone can register on MsgHub and enter all his channels. If someone else now needs an instant answer, he just logs into MsgHub, searches for the person he wants to reach and enters the message.
MsgHub will the broadcast this message to all the channels of the receiver.
This will dramatically increase the probability that the person actually notices that someone tries to reach it.
For sending the messages, MsgHub will use it's own accounts on the different services. So there will not be any need for entering you passwords. Whenever possible it will send private messages.
For services like Twitter we are planning to just inform someone with a short message like "XYZ want's to contact you on the topic of ABC, please check your email!"
Of course there are a lot of problems involving privacy in the concept. We are just in the start phase of the project and thinking a lot about concepts and privacy and at this point I'm not currently able to tell or promise a lot. There's only this one thing we know and we think is great: You don't have to know all channels of a person to contact it. It's completely enough if you know the name. MsgHub will broadcast the message to all the channels it does know, not to the ones the sender knows. And it will not tell these channels (and not even which ones it does use) to the sender. Great, ain't it? :D
The first interface for the service will, obviously a webpage written in PHP. But we are imagining much more. There could be clients for different smartphone operating systems that would first try to phone someone, then send an sms and, if no answer comes back via sms over 10 minutes (or whatever amount of time you wish), it would start the broadcasting.
Currently we are designing a database-sheme that can easily be extended for including new services. We are also looking for good howtos and PHP libs to communicate with the APIs of Twitter and Facebook and with the POP/SMTP interface of E-Mail servers.
The development of MsgHub is OpenSource. Check http://code.google.com/p/msghub/ for more information.
If you would like to join the development or you have a great idea, write to msghub [at] googlegroups.com.
Have Fun!
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