Private, self-hosted alternative to Brightkite?

November 1, 2009 2:39 PM

Looking for a self-hosted, private alternative to Brightkite for sharing family stuff.

My wife and I (mis)-use Brightkite as a two-person, location-aware version of Twitter. All our posts are private (we two are one another's only "friends"), and it's turned out to be a really handy way to let each other know where we are, indicate when we're on our way home, and even to post little snapshots of our daughter to each other through the day. Really fun and useful.

Although, we admittedly use the app "anti-socially," always trying make sure everything stays as private as it can, obviously it's an uphill battle with an app that's designed to broadcast lots of personal information to large groups of people.

Any suggestions for a more private alternative to Brightkite? Preferably something Open Source and self-hosted where we own and control as much of the data as possible. Not against API stuff interacting with Fire Eagle or what have you; as long as we maintain control over keeping everything as private as you'd want a note on your own fridge to be. Do-able?

posted by merlinmann to technology (7 comments total)

Email?
posted by torquemaniac at 2:43 PM on November 1, 2009 [1 favorite]

Any worthwhile blog software will allow two authors. Wordpress, etc.
posted by Rendus at 2:45 PM on November 1, 2009

Twitter + private tweets + twitpic?
posted by aheckler at 2:45 PM on November 1, 2009

I've been interested in the things that people are building on top of jabber which you can use for short messaging stuff but also link to private pix that are hosted wherever, not sure if you need the pix functionality built in to what you use. Android phones have the BuddyMob option which is location aware and you could put on top of a jabber server someplace. IM+ is similar and will run off an iphone as well. You can click around the client list here, there seem to be a few otions where the combination of location-aware + pix + self-hosting via jabber will work out okay. Is there something you need that can't be handled in XMPP?
posted by jessamyn at 4:46 PM on November 1, 2009 [1 favorite]

Status.net software is run as a hosted service or can be privately hosted - http://status.net/. This is the same software that powers Identi.ca.
posted by annathea at 7:24 PM on November 1, 2009

Yammer is private enterprise microblogging - not sure if it can be adapted to personal use, but might be worth a look.
posted by misskaz at 7:12 AM on November 2, 2009

Jaiku is a Twitter-alike that has a slightly different feature set that was open sourced after being purchased by Google and subsequently ported to Google App Engine.
posted by mikeh at 7:56 AM on November 2, 2009