About
About the site
Mosuki is the best way to hear about events from people you know!
Tired of missing great events you heard about too late? Not enough free time to read event lists and search event websites? Mosuki tells you about the events you don't want to miss, without making you spend the time to find them.
Mosuki makes event discovery a passive process. People no longer need to read arbitrary event listings, do web searches, or pester their peers for plans. Through its website and email, Mosuki tracks events in its social networks and informs its users about events they personally don't want to miss.
Mosuki is a patentable, privacy oriented, information sharing platform born from an academic inquiry into the mathematical properties of social networks. The Mosuki platform allows events to travel throughout the Mosuki event network without giving away sensitive information. People hear about events through their friends, making Mosuki events more valuable than events from other sources. Discussion forums and strong privacy tools further increase this value. Mosuki is the only social event system which provides passive discovery and strong privacy safeguards.
About the founders
Building Mosuki over the last few years has been a labor of love for us. We are:
Jeremy Avnet earned a BA in Pure Mathematics with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2000. Afterwards, he programmed for the experimental economics department and later became a system administrator for two Santa Cruz based startups. In 2002, Jeremy joined the PhD program in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico to study the new science of Complex Adaptive Systems. As a graduate researcher, he produced a paper on mathematically evaluating trust in social networks. In 2003, Jeremy began studying the mathematical structure of the Friendster social network with Matt Chisholm and Jonathan Moore. Ultimately, this collaboration lead to the genesis of Mosuki. In 2004, Jeremy went to China to study with John Holland and the Santa Fe Institute where he co-authored a paper about the effect of reputation in Prisoner's Dilemma games. He also designed and built the Mosuki web cluster.
Matt Chisholm earned a BA in Pure Mathematics with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2000. In 2002, Matt earned a MA in Theoretical Linguistics with a focus in Syntax & Semantics, also from the University of California at Santa Cruz. While in the Lingustics program, he helped re-design the curriculum for Computational Lingusitics course, and went on to be the teaching assistant for the course. After graduating from the Linguistics program, Matt settled in San Francisco, taking various user-interface focused jobs, including a complete redesign of the BitTorrent client. Matt has been programming since he was 11, and is responsible for Mosuki's AJAX interface.
Ross Cohen grew up in New York City where he attended Stuyvesant High School. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelors in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1999. Afterwards he fled to California in search of better weather. Ross He was the manager and tech lead for the Linux kernel team at Akamai and holds a networking patent for developing their unique testing infrastructure. Ross started out his career at Quantum doing hard drive simulation. In addition to professional work, he has contributed to a number of Open Source projects, including being the primary author of Codeville, a distributed version control system.
We've had a a lot of help from Ridge S., Nealesh P., Jonathan M., Steve H., and John S. We also want to thank Bryan K. and Michael D, and everyone else who gave us support, encouragement, and ideas early on.
South Park avatars created by Elisabeth using South Park Studios' Create a Character.
About the technology
The platform: The Mosuki website is built on top of a general-purpose platform for sharing and discovering data over a network of users. The platform allows you to define objects, or arbitrary collections of data. Events, places, people, messages, feeds and photos are some of the objects currently in use.
Visibility and discoverability: Users may specify the basic visibility of the object by defining the set of users who can see that object, or by making it public (all users) or private (no users). The system also lets users set the discoverability of an object; the degree to which it will be advertised over the system to other users, and indexed by search engines. The system takes into account privacy and security concerns by properly compartmentalizing data into objects and enforcing basic visibility of objects in a single, low-level part of the code. The majority of the visibility and discoverability code is used by the back-end and just works from the user's perspective; users don't need to think about security and privacy.
Web framework: This backend is connected to a web framework that generates traditional HTML pages as well as providing XML for use by our AJAX GUI (and eventually as an external REST API).
Sharing strategies: Objects can be connected together in an ad-hoc way. We also have implemented several features that mitigate problems that occur when you create an object and connect it to other objects that were created by other users possibly "far away" from you in the network.