Jelly
Jelly is a new way of developing websites that works to close the gap between web users and web developers. The software, which is open-source, lives on the server of a user who maintains complete control over the data. Jelly wraps all the complex data processes that are needed to develop interactive, data-driven, social websites, into a web development environment that looks and feels much like the web services that users are used to, like Facebook, Flickr, or Youtube. By working to make the experience of developing a web service as fluid, natural, and beautiful as the experience of using a web service like Vimeo, Jelly hopes to empower the enthusiastic and creative class of web 2.0 service users to break free of static structures and begin to make the websites that they imagine.
We're unhappy with the tension between web services and their users - the futility of user responses to corporate censorship within web services, corporate ownership by web services, and corporate buyouts of web services illustrates the merciless authority of the information architecture in all of these cases. We don't consider current web services to express social web structure, but rather the traditional domination by capital, against which social effects have little overall consequence.
With Jelly, we're hoping to enact a real user-generated revolution. Not just as a subversive measure, but as a practical way of allowing web services to reach communities which capital does not. Jelly makes it really easy to organize and publish interactive information without relying on fickle, market-based services, and without investing in programming labor.
Jelly users maintain full control over their data, allowing them to independently define rules of accessibility, monetization, copyright, or open licenses. Additionally, we are currently working on distributed data-sharing architecture for Jelly that, among many other things, makes it easy to share data across different websites and reduces the hosting cost of running a web service.
Basically, we offer a really fun, fluid, free tool that eliminates many of the barriers to building and running an web service. Jelly can be installed by placing a single PHP file on one's hosting server, or by using the web installer at http://jellyproject.com/. The entire interface runs inside the browser, and no additional software is necessary.