Like a heart-broken lover, after Wave, I hesitate to get excited about the open source projects I hear about. Wave never really panned out, and personally I think there was too much T & A and not enough brains and horsepower there. All show and little tell. On the other hand, there’s ThinkUp, a project just emerging from the ashes of its previous incarnations and looking refreshed and energetic.

ThinkUp (Expert Labs Project) is a PHP/mySQL program that will scour social media sites for its members and turn the cacophony (some would say CACAphony) it finds there into a nearly coherent conversion. Currently working with Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, it has a sporty plugin architecture and a simple, modern, clean look to its pages.

Wonderful, you say, drifting off, but what does it do?

I kinda wondered about that myself, so instead of setting up the crawler as a cron job, I ran it manually. Anyone into the open source world will enjoy watching the crawler cheerfully tell you what it is doing, babbling away with just enough info about how hard it’s working and how much juice Twitter is allowing you to suck in until next time. The crawler looks at the accounts you’ve set up, grabs the posts, Tweets, for example and stores them in the database. The data is sliced, diced and messed with and displayed in many different useful ways. I guess if you wondered about the expression “wisdom of the crowd” which I’d challenge daily, here’s a tool to test that very idea. One of the plugins available will decode short links, another does something with geolocation that is probably worth doing.

Allow members of your crowd to sign up for your ThinkUp site. They then connect your ThinkUp app to Twitter (and the other sites if you care to). Assuming people are talking on Twitter, and that they have allowed their posts to appear on the public timeline, you should be able to see conversations, whole subjects developing and interlinked.

Head over to Gina Trapani’s Github and grab the code. It literally took me 5 minutes to install and get it running. ThinkUp requires a server with php5,  mysql and a minimum of pep if you plan on having members and guests. Give it a try or wait until we open our own VUC ThinkUp.

2600hz is home to a collection of open-source telephony software that enables the use of the FreeSWITCH, Asterisk and YATE switching libraries. Initially built around the blue.box project, we aim to provide a collection of software to power your GUI, your cloud-based telephony switch and/or your monitoring and maintenance tool set.

Video testing – Next week we’ll be doing a real video conference, watch the site for more info

ClueCon - No one wished to comment. Whatever.

Tim Panton and David Burgess describe the project to deploy the first GSM phone system to the small island nation of Niue.

The system consists of OpenSource software and (largely) commodity hardware. The project uses OpenBTS, Asterisk and USRP. Tim will try to describe (with help from OpenBTS‘s David Burgess) the technical, regulatory and logistical challenges that we faced before we could make the first call. See also David Burgess’ presentation at eComm 2009.

David Burgess, last minute tweaks

VUC regular contributor Tim Panton has been a software developer and consultant at Westhawk Ltd more than 25 years, working on a diverse range of projects, from chemical plant simulation to tourism web sites. He is also a contributor to open source projects, in particular GJTAPI a framework for implementing JTAPI (The Java Telephony API) and Westhawk’s Java SNMP stack. In recent years Tim has been predominantly involved in Asterisk development and implementation, working closely with key industry players he has been championing innovative integration of voice technologies . Tim is also the technical director of PhoneFromHere.com Ltd.

LINKS from the discussion.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-317307.mp3|titles=Kamailio 3.0]

Guests: Daniel-Constantin Mierla, Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul and Alex Balashov (Evariste Systems)

Discussion of why you would need Kamailio, who uses it, what is does.

Kamailio 3.0.0, the first release that combines the features of Kamailio (OpenSER) and SIP Express Router (SER) in the same SIP server instance, and the vision of future development within SIP Router project.

Kamailio 3.0.0:

- new features

- how to use it to deal with latest challenges in communications: SIP instant messaging, presence, and social networking

SIP Router

- project achievements since its start in 2008

- future development

Links from the IRC  #vuc channel