124 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
124 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
# GreatApe story
|
|
|
|
GreatApe — live audio and video conversations for the Fediverse.
|
|
|
|
This is the story of GreatApe!
|
|
|
|
I am going to tell this story in reverse.
|
|
|
|
## Fediverse
|
|
|
|
The era: 2020 to Present
|
|
|
|
## Research-and-Development
|
|
|
|
The era: 2019 to Present
|
|
|
|
At the beginning of this era, in 2019, GreatApe wasn't called “GreatApe” yet.
|
|
But the idea of it being a form social-media platform, with rooms that people joined, where they had video or audio conversations, was already there — and had been there since 2017.
|
|
|
|
In actuality, we had thoughts on a number of different for applications for the technology we were developing —
|
|
but for the sake of telling a story about _GreatApe_ we will focus on just this one appication.
|
|
|
|
We had some constraints for the application —
|
|
|
|
* it must to work in a web-browser,
|
|
* the user should must _not_ have to install anything to use it,
|
|
* it must be privacy-protecting (from people outside the conversation),
|
|
* it needs to make the cost of streaming video in real-time negligible.
|
|
|
|
These constraints came from the industrial-research we had done prior to the start of this research-and-development.
|
|
(More on that later.)
|
|
|
|
Back in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, when the core tree-stream technology was first invented — the technology that would later be called “logjam” — it wasn't yet possible to accomplish this.
|
|
The web-browsers of the day lacked the necessary lower-level technologies to enable it.
|
|
But, decades later — with the addition of the WebRTC technology to the web-browser, all of a sudden it looked like it might be possible.
|
|
|
|
The goal was to recreate the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology which invented in the late 1990s to mid-2000s — but to this time re-create it to work within a web-browser.
|
|
Thus started the research-and-development.
|
|
|
|
Although the research-and-development was started by [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) back in the late 1990s —
|
|
in this era of research-and-development, [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) with Massoud Seifi managed and sponsored the research-and-development.
|
|
|
|
One of the first people to join the research-and-development team was Sal Rahman.
|
|
Sal Rahman didn't work on the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, but instead explored full-mesh networks, using WebRTC in the web-browser.
|
|
Through his work we learned about many of the limitations of full-mesh works, and when they should be used and when they shouldn't.
|
|
Later Sal Rahman left the research-and-development team.
|
|
|
|
Later Mehrdad Mirsamie joined the research-and-development team.
|
|
Mehrdad Mirsamie successfully recreated the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, using WebRTC in the web-browser.
|
|
|
|
Later Muhammad Zaid Ali and Benyamin Azarkhazin joined the team and, working with Mehrdad Mirsamie, further developed the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology.
|
|
|
|
Their work is ongoing.
|
|
|
|
## Industrial-Research
|
|
|
|
The era: 2018 to Present
|
|
|
|
## Hiatus
|
|
|
|
The era: 2010 to 2018
|
|
|
|
## Show in a Box
|
|
|
|
The era: 2007 to 2010
|
|
|
|
Back then, video on the Internet and the Web was just starting to be practical — it wasn't before.
|
|
|
|
**Show in a Box**, often initialized to as “**SIAB**”, was the first open-source social-media software for video — and it was **decentralized** social-media software.
|
|
|
|
In this era, both _decentralized_ social-media networks and _centralized_ social-media networks were popular.
|
|
|
|
The centralized social-media network Twitter was _not_ popular yet, and was just getting started — at the time it was mainly populated by very early adopters.
|
|
MySpace was the popular _centralized_ social-media network in this era — it had a lot to do with why another _centralized_ social-media network, YouTube, initially got popular.
|
|
Although, back then, YouTube was mainly used as a way of sharing videos on MySpace (as an embed on MySpace) — because it was the only free video hosting website that supported playing video in (a non defunct technology known as) Flash.
|
|
MySpace's decline later led to the rise of yet another cenralized social-media network: Facebook.
|
|
|
|
A popular **decentralized** social-media network, in this era, was what was then called the **blogosphere** — the distributed network of **weblogs** (often shorterned as “blogs“).
|
|
Although during this era, there was still some debate (that began in the late 1990s) over whether to call these “**web-logs**”, or “**web-journals**”, or “**web-diaries**”.
|
|
As the story goes — “**web-log**” won, got concatenated as “**weblog**”, someone (not knowing “**weblog**” = “**web**” + “**log**”) thought it was a concatenation for “**we**” + “**blog**” and shortened it to “**blog**”.
|
|
|
|
Many people had wanted to do **video** over the Internet, and then the Web for years (if not decades).
|
|
As **blogs** rose as a popular form of social-media, some people wanted to do **video** over **blogs**.
|
|
A community was formed around this idea via a mailing-list — the **VideoBlogging Mailing List**.
|
|
The mailing-list attracted many people interested in video on the Internet and the Web.
|
|
|
|
Someone from the **VideoBlogging Mailing List** shoterned “**video blog**” to “**vlog**”.
|
|
|
|
A conference related to the **VideoBlogging Mailing List** was created — Vloggercon.
|
|
(More on that later.)
|
|
|
|
And a small number of people from the **VideoBlogging Mailing List** created **Show in a Box** (**SIAB**):
|
|
|
|
* Adam W. Warner
|
|
* [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/)
|
|
* Cheryl Colan
|
|
* Devlon Duthie
|
|
* Enric Teller
|
|
* Jacob Redding
|
|
* Jay Dedman
|
|
* Jen Simmons
|
|
* Markus Sandy
|
|
* Michael Verdi
|
|
* Milt Lee
|
|
* Ryanne Hodson
|
|
* Rudy Jahchan
|
|
|
|
From that list of people who created **Show in a Box** (**SIAB**) — [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) later went on to create **GreatApe**.
|
|
His experience with **SIAB** influenced GreatApe.
|
|
|
|
## Vloggercon
|
|
|
|
## Vlog
|
|
|
|
## VideoBlogging Mailing List
|
|
|
|
## HTML5 video
|
|
|
|
The era: 2006 to Present
|
|
|
|
## Invention
|
|
|
|
The era: late 1990s to mid-2000s
|