My current project: Broadcastr. It’s Twitter meets Facebook’s wall for the enterprise.

Before I spend too much time building the prototype I wanted to throw the idea out to the community to see what you think.

Broadcastr is a light weight communications vehicle that takes the best of Twitter and Facebook wall and puts it inside your firewall. It will deliver as a Ubuntu JeOS, LAMP, VM Appliance that can be quicly started on any VM server. It will use Lotus Domino LDAP for authentication against the Domino Directory. I have posted a screen shot to give you and idea... Screen shot of Broadcastr.

The Overview

Your company is looking for a Twitter / Facebook wall type solution. (I will spare you from explaining why your company would want this). You simply start up this VM, answer a few questions and hit the url with a browser. The user base will be built over time as new users login. They will be challenged for their Lotus Notes http username and password and upon LDAP authentication a page will be created for them. The future of the users session will be handled by PHP and MySQL. The admin of the system will determine the life of the session. Since it's inside the firewall, the default is set very far out so there is an illusion of SSO.

The page that is create will act as a wall of sorts. Anyone can write on anyone's wall and since its a company only site anyone can follow anyone. This concept is broken out further, anyone can create a 'project'. A project is identical to a persons page. Anyone can follow a public project, allowing them to read or pull feeds from broadcasts from that project page.

Similar to People and Projects there will be the concept of Lotus Domino directory groups.  Directory groups will also have their own page. Only the groups chosen to be pulled into the system will be managed over time. This will cut down on synchronization of the two directories in the background. Any person group from the Domino Directory can be selected and instantly anyone can post to that group and all members will receive that broadcast on their page.

I have a majority of this already completed. In posting this I've had to do a balancing act of how much to complete before making the idea public. I will error on the side that the feedback will trump all since its is that what i need to know right now. I hope to get a working prototype up on http://www.broadcastr.net in the coming weeks. The problem is the domino authnication piece (which is up and running). It's asking a TON but I've put in a request to Bruce to cross pollinate ideajam.net or openntf.org for the LDAP calls. This way those registered at those sites can poke around on the prototype and be spared yet another registration.

What about DomCastr? Pure coincidence.  Every idea above including the name was in place before Dec's announcement. I wish him luck! Bottom line, you can see from his post and this one, they are very different.

There is another fun part to this posting. The invitation to all of you to occasionally check in to watch the progress of the idea. My hope is to turn all the amazing knowledge I've gained from PlanetLotus.org into another successful idea/product.