Locker: The 'me' platform (for Node.js?) from the creator of XMPP

A couple of weeks ago after discovering Memento, an iPhone app the sucks in all your tweets, check-ins, and other social data to create a very elegant journal of your personal goings on, I quickly wanted an app that would do the same on the web and make it easy for me to consume the data. I had seen Storytlr, an PHP app that creates very nice lifestreams, but it was a bit too presentation-focused for my taste.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Locker this morning from Jeremie Miller the creator of XMPP. Locker is more of a braindump than an application at this point, but Jeremie’s Readme-Driven-Development provides a glimpse of where the project is headed.

• Contexts - A context is a place where I have data about myself, such as an account on a site or service, or in some desktop app, on my phone, or even from a device.
• Sources / Sinks - The source is the bit of code that fetches/syncs my data from a given context, the sink is the code that knows how to publish data back into a context.
• Collections - My data from the many different sources gets organized into common collections, such as places, contacts, messages, statuses, pages, etc.
• Apps - Once my data is in my locker, I can then run apps locally within that locker that do useful or fun things for me without having to give my data up to any web site or give anyone access to my online accounts.

Doing a bit of source spelunking reveals a healthy dose of Node.js as in this Flickr example based on Express and Connect, one of many in the Connectors folder. The list includes the usual suspects such as Facebook, Twitter, LastFM, Foursquare, and YouTube, but also includes connectors for Amazon history, Chrome history, and Google Contacts.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, writing on ReadWriteWeb, the Locker project is part of Slingly, a new venture from Jeremie.

Called The Locker Project, the open source service will capture what’s called exhaust data from users’ activities around the web and offline via sensors, put it firmly in their own possesion and then allow them to run local apps that are built to leverage their data. Miller’s three person company, Singly, will provide the corporate support that the open source project needs in order to remain viable. I’m very excited about this project; Miller’s backgrounds, humble brilliance and vision for app-enabling my personal data history is very exciting to me.

[Source on GitHub] [Follow @LockerProject]