I'm always wearing about outsourcing key features of software (like activity streams) to third parties. What's the advantage of doing so in this case?
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Hi @timjahn, I wholeheartedly agree with your wariness. Introducing external dependencies is never a choice to be taken lightly. The whole reason I created Collabinate was to avoid being attached to a social "platform" for other products I was building.
But here's how I see it, and how I built it: unless activity streams are your core functionality (e.g. you're building a high scale social network), you should treat it the same way you would treat SMTP, SMS, logging, analytics, or even a database server. The domain is complex - why reinvent the wheel? If you can use a pure API to have your social collaboration functionality work out of the box, why spend weeks or months building it, and then have to worry about it as it scales? You own the data, you build the functionality the way you want, Collabinate handles the hard parts.
That said, we actually have a customer who IS building a high-scale social network on top of Collabinate. It's full featured enough that they can just worry about their differentiating features.
I'd be happy to talk more about it. You can reach me at jack at collabinate.com.
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I'm the founder of Collabinate. We want to bring collaboration to all software and help the world get to the creativity that results. Our first product is an API that makes it super simple for software makers to create social streams in their apps. I'd love to talk to you about it!
Thanks @michaelsacca for the add!
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Hi @stefanobernardi! Thanks for the comment. Right now, the privacy features are completely up to your implementation. The Collabinate API handles the hard part of managing the relationships between people and the entities that they follow, and building the chronological activity feeds based on the streams of those entities. The backend runs on top of a graph database with some sophisticated algorithms to handle this at scale. Would love to talk more about it, drop me a line: jack at collabinate.com.
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