163 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
163 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
# GreatApe story
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GreatApe — live audio and video conversations for the Fediverse.
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This is the story of GreatApe!
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I am going to tell this story in reverse.
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## Logo
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The era: 2022
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By October 2022, work on turning GreatApe into Fediverse software was on its way —
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Farzaneh Amini was working on the GreatApe UX & UI,
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Meysam Mousavi was working on the GreatApe back-end technology,
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Mehrdad Mirsamie, Muhammad Zaid Ali, & Benyamin Azarkhazin were working on the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, and
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[Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) & Massoud Seifi were sponsoring and managing the work.
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GreatApe needed a logo.
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[Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) asked Chet Earl Woodside to create a logo for GreatApe — and so he did.
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The then new GreatApe logo shown to the world on November 3rd.
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## UX & UI
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The era: 2022 to Present
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On Thursday June 30th, 2022, Farzaneh Amini join GreatApe.
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She is the person most responsible for GreatApe's look-and-feel, through her work on GreatApe's user-experience (UX) and user-interface (UI).
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## Back-End
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The era: 2022 to Present
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Modern computer application technology tends to be divided into a front-end and a back-end.
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The front-end is what you, the person using the application, see and interact with.
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The back-end is what actually makes the application work.
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GreatApe needed a back-end.
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On Friday May 13th, 2022 [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) started the GreatApe back-end.
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On Thursday August 4th, 2022 Meysam Mousavi took over the work on the GreatApe back-end.
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Meysam Mousavi did the majority of the work on the GreatApe back-end.
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[Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) & Massoud Seifi sponsored and managed the work.
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## Fediverse
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The era: 2020 to Present
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## Research-and-Development
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The era: 2019 to Present
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At the beginning of this era, in 2019, GreatApe wasn't called “GreatApe” yet.
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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.
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In actuality, we had thoughts on a number of different for applications for the technology we were developing —
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but for the sake of telling a story about _GreatApe_ we will focus on just this one appication.
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We had some constraints for the application —
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* it must to work in a web-browser,
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* the user should must _not_ have to install anything to use it,
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* it must be privacy-protecting (from people outside the conversation),
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* it needs to make the cost of streaming video in real-time negligible.
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These constraints came from the industrial-research we had done prior to the start of this research-and-development.
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(More on that later.)
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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.
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The web-browsers of the day lacked the necessary lower-level technologies to enable it.
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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.
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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.
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Thus started the research-and-development.
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Although the research-and-development was started by [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) back in the late 1990s —
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in this era of research-and-development, [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) with Massoud Seifi managed and sponsored the research-and-development.
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One of the first people to join the research-and-development team was Sal Rahman.
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Sal Rahman didn't work on the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, but instead explored full-mesh networks, using WebRTC in the web-browser.
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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.
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Later Sal Rahman left the research-and-development team.
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Later Mehrdad Mirsamie joined the research-and-development team.
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Mehrdad Mirsamie successfully recreated the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, using WebRTC in the web-browser.
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Later Muhammad Zaid Ali and Benyamin Azarkhazin joined the team and, working with Mehrdad Mirsamie, further developed the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology.
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Their work is ongoing.
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## Industrial-Research
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The era: 2018 to Present
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## Hiatus
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The era: 2010 to 2018
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## Show in a Box
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The era: 2007 to 2010
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Back then, video on the Internet and the Web was just starting to be practical — it wasn't before.
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**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.
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In this era, both _decentralized_ social-media networks and _centralized_ social-media networks were popular.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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MySpace's decline later led to the rise of yet another cenralized social-media network: Facebook.
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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“).
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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**”.
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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**”.
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Many people had wanted to do **video** over the Internet, and then the Web for years (if not decades).
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As **blogs** rose as a popular form of social-media, some people wanted to do **video** over **blogs**.
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A community was formed around this idea via a mailing-list — the **VideoBlogging Mailing List**.
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The mailing-list attracted many people interested in video on the Internet and the Web.
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Someone from the **VideoBlogging Mailing List** shoterned “**video blog**” to “**vlog**”.
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A conference related to the **VideoBlogging Mailing List** was created — Vloggercon.
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(More on that later.)
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And a small number of people from the **VideoBlogging Mailing List** created **Show in a Box** (**SIAB**):
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* Adam W. Warner
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* [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/)
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* Cheryl Colan
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* Devlon Duthie
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* Enric Teller
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* Jacob Redding
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* Jay Dedman
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* Jen Simmons
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* Markus Sandy
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* Michael Verdi
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* Milt Lee
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* Ryanne Hodson
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* Rudy Jahchan
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From that list of people who created **Show in a Box** (**SIAB**) — [Charles Iliya Krempeaux](http://changelog.ca/) later went on to create **GreatApe**.
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His experience with **SIAB** influenced GreatApe.
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## Vloggercon
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## Vlog
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## VideoBlogging Mailing List
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## HTML5 video
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The era: 2006 to Present
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## Invention
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The era: late 1990s to mid-2000s
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