Imeem
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- The correct title of this article is imeem. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
imeem is a social media service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. Launched in October 2004,[1] the service has both a social network structure as well as a content browsing/filtering structure similar to that of flickr and youtube. It works on an advert based business model, and is therefore free to use.
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[edit] Features
Visitors to the site may access music, video, photographs and blog posts, however commenting, rating, tagging and the posting of new content requires a user to register an account. A key feature promoted by imeem is the media playlist where content posted from multiple sources may be collected into a playlist which itself may be published for comments, tags and rating. imeem provides a number of mechanisms to make content available to audiences outside of the site through RSS syndication and embedding content into external sites. However, at the time of writing (Feb 2007), MySpace has prevented the embedding of imeem content into its pages.
Imeem links users through topic groups called "meems", relating to common interests. Media content can exist in custom profile pages and topic groups (called "meems", from the word "meme"), as well as in browsable content channels and charts. Meems can serve as online communities for artists, bands, clubs, films, schools, festivals, concert tours, friends, and sports enthusiasts. However a recent redesign of the site has renamed most of the references to the word "meem" with "group", presumably this is an attempt to reduce user confusion over the word. Formerly it was possible for links to be made between groups which had related subject matters however this linking feature was only ever implemented on the client and has since been removed, it is no longer possible to access related groups on the web site, although the client still displays these groups.
The imeem website integrates with an optional software client. The chat feature of the client allows users to have 1-on-1 and group chats with other imeem users and users of other popular instant messaging services such as AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and GoogleTalk. The notification feature gives users real-time updates on new activity in their imeem account or groups. Use of the client also provides extra privacy features.
[edit] History
The service has changed drastically since its original inception. When it first launched the client was the primary platform, the website merely existed as a means for users to register and download the client. The original service was billed as a 'distributed, peer-to-peer, social network'[2] every client on the network had a database, which would accelerate access to content deemed to be close to the user. The database would also generate and store references to media content shared on the network, if a user shared photos or a podcast then the data would only exist on the client database network, users who wanted to view the content would access it by peering directly with the publisher.
While this distributed model was interesting it proved to be difficult to attract many users since the only way to participate was to download the imeem client software. The application proved to be something of a resource hog for power users since the database could grow to quite large proportions just by associating with a few individuals who were sharing a lot of content.
Over time more features have been added to the website and the features of the client have been pared down to leave the core messaging, media sharing and notification features, and the innovative distributed database model has been centralized. Now the vast majority of the features are available without requiring a client download the service has rapidly grown in popularity, in particular with classes of user who have traditionally found themselves on the other side of the digital divide.[3]
[edit] Copyright
In terms of content privacy and editing, imeem abides by a user participation model and maintains a set of community guidelines, user flagging of inappropriate content, and a notice-and-takedown policy.
Imeem advises its users to respect copyright law, and is not responsible for any infringing activities in accordance with the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act,1998.
[edit] Privacy
Imeem's initial press releases hailed it as "providing a possible solution to the privacy problem" of social networking.[4][5] This perhaps remains to be seen. Imeem's popularity is increasing, but it has been proposed that this is due to its "laissez-faire attitude towards copyright issues".[6][7]
Meems are either public or private. Content for public meems is stored on the imeem servers and can be viewed via the web site. Users may choose to create private meems to distribute content to an arbitrary (but controlled) audience, in which case content is stored locally amongst peers and is only available through the downloadable imeem client software.
Imeem initially established 5 levels of privacy for uploaded content:
- Myself
- My friends
- My friends' friends
- All imeem users
- The Internet (web publishable)
Recently this has been reduced to 3 levels, Myself, My friends & The Internet, furthermore many the ability to set privacy levels on many content has disappeared, leaving users with fewer privacy controls than they once had.
[edit] Security
- The original imeem client was designed from the ground up with security in mind[8]
- The imeem client conducts most of its network activity using an encrypted protocol, making it difficult to monitor user activity.
- Conversations via imeems IM functionality and group chats are encrypted and only visible to conversation participants.
- On startup the application validates with a central server. This ensures that unauthorized clients cannot connect and run malicious exploits (such as monitoring traffic or spoofing identities) against the network.
- Software updates are also delivered via the client and authenticated before they are installed.
The website obviously lacks many of the security features of the client, and since the majority of the content is now delivered from the website many of the original security features are no longer applicable outside the basic chat and file sharing features available on the client.
[edit] imeem Technology
imeem is primarily written in C# which allows the same code to execute under Microsoft's .Net and the open source Mono environments, this has allowed imeem to use both Windows and Linux based servers to run the service and website and as a result imeem developers have had an active role in developing Mono by reporting problems and contributing patches to the project.
For a time imeem supported a version of imeem for Mac OS X[9] using mono coupled with a library christened 'Dumbarton' which bridges data and methods between Objective C and Mono. The name of the library is a reference to the Dumbarton Bridge in the San Francisco Bay which crosses occasionally foul smelling salt marshes that can make the crossing a less than pleasurable experience, this represented a suitable analogy for crossing between the two environments.[10] This library has been released under the LGPL as an alternative to Cocoa# and can be downloaded from the imeem site, althought the imeem client for Mac is no longer available.
[edit] Trivia
The primary port used by the imeem client and servers is 1729, this has special significance as the Hardy-Ramanujan number and a Carmichael number. The client also users 2465 as a preferred port for UDP traffic, this is also a Carmichael number.
[edit] References
- ^ http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2004/10/06/a-little-more-on-imeem/
- ^ http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/08/15/imeem-launches-desktop-component-for-distributed-social/
- ^ http://riddimmethod.net/?p=151
- ^ http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/01-24-2005/0002898612&EDATE=
- ^ http://www.trendcentral.com/trends/trendarticle.asp?tcArticleId=1419
- ^ http://mashable.com/2007/02/15/imeem/
- ^ http://feeds.feedburner.com/itsrishi
- ^ http://snm.imeem.com/blogs/2005/01/25/Kn3Hvy6x/imeem_security
- ^ http://developer.apple.com/business/macmarket/imeem.html
- ^ http://allan.imeem.com/blogentry/gbgC7kTg
