SwiftRiver Development Update?

[Curtis Carmichael]

Sorry if I missed an announcement somewhere, but it appears SwiftRiver development stopped as there has not been any activity since July 16, 2013: https://github.com/ushahidi/SwiftRiver

Is the Ushahidi platform going to replace SwiftRiver?

https://github.com/ushahidi/platform

Asking as I would like to install SwiftRiver, but can hold if another product will be replacing it... or there may be another release of SwiftRiver int he works.

Regards,

Curtis

[Dan King]

Hi Curtis,

The Ushahidi platform is Ushahidi’s flagship product. SwiftRiver followed as a way to look specifically at social media with capabilities not available with the Ushahidi platform. 

Ushahidi is not being replaced. It continues to be developed in parallel with their social media tool sets.

While SwiftRiver is still officially promoted and supported by Ushahidi (see http://www.ushahidi.com/product/swiftriver/ and https://wiki.ushahidi.com/display/WIKI/SwiftRiver), development has been turned over the community.

Recent development efforts at Ushahidi have been focused on a new project called CrisisNet. In a recent podcast (http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/308), CrisisNet CTO Jonathan Morgan, http://www.ushahidi.com/author/jonathon/ spoke about the evolution of the platform.

One big difference I gather is that CrisisNet hosts curates the data and users query that curated set. This is different from the SwiftRiver model where users of the platform create their own social media search queries (I.e. Twitter hashtags). I’ve only begun to dabble with CrisitNet but in theory the software could be installed on one’s server enabling curation of a custom data set.

As for SwiftRiver, our organization (http://www.FirstToSee.org) has been up and running for 18 months and have pulled in over 6 million droplets (i.e. tweets)  into various “rivers”. We’re currently investigating the best way to extend SwiftRiver to handle additional social media sources such as Vine videos and Instagram photos, among other sources.

Last month I gave a presentation at FOSS4G in Portland, OR, USA on our SwiftRiver deployment. See https://vimeo.com/106234978 and http://www.viewpoint.pro/foss4g

I’ll be posting more to this group in the coming days so stay tuned. In the meantime feel free to contact me directly if you or anyone you know is interested in being part of community effort to take the open source social media platform to a new level.

Dan

office (253) 426-3803

twitter @viewpointpro

[Giuseppe Calamita]

Many are the practitioners interested in using Swiftriver; a limitation is: the lack of documentation for installing it on Windows; few experiences reported from users in the wiki.

I'd like you may meet part of them.

Regards,

Giuseppe