Anahita Social Engine ™ is a light and scalable open source solution for building Social Networks, Intranets, and so many other types of social web experiences! Anahita is outstanding because it:

• provides essential social features out of the box
• the look & feel is fully customizable
• follows Google Open Social Standards
• works with Amazon Cloud storage
• provides rich API for developing Social Applications

Feature List

Anahita Social Engine ™ currently provides the following set of features

• Rich & Elegant User Profiles
• Follows Google Open Social standards
• Open ID sign in
• Flexible Lead-Follow-Mutual Social Graphing similar to Twitter, Digg.com, or Flickr
• Organic Privacy Manager based on Social Graph and Privacy Groups
• Intelligent Activity Updates
• Translatable Interface & Messages
• Public Messaging
• Notifications & Requests
• Fully Ajax User Interfaces
• Fully Customizable Look & Feel
• Seamless Amazon Cloud Storage System Integration
• Rich API for developing Social Applications
• A solid platform for running Social Applications (Blogs, Wikis, Discussion Forums, Photos)
• Photo Sharing Applications
• Written in beautiful MVC code

 A Flexible Social Graphing Model

Anahita Social Engine provides a flexible Lead-Follow-Mutual model similar to Twitter, Digg.com, or Flickr. This means individuals could Follow a Lead's activities, and a Lead may or may not decide to follow back.Two people that are mutually following each other's activities are in a Mutual relationship.

The terms Lead, Follow, and Mutual could be changed using the system translation files depending on the context of the social web project. For example for an eLearning environment we could use Teacher, Student, Team-mate or in an Arts & Music sharing website they could be translated into Idol, Fan, Friend

An Organic Privacy Manager

Anahita Social Engine privacy manager is quite flexible and organic. People can easily assign privacy access levels to their profiles, profile fields, activity updates, and application views. Privacy access is applied based on the following criteria:

• Social Graphs (Public, Registered, Followers, Leaders, Mutual Friends, Myself Only)
• Social Groups (people can assign the people in their social cloud in different privacy groups, then limit a privacy access to a specific group) a Social Cloud is the sum of all people in a person's group of Leads, Follows, or Mutual contacts.

 Anahita Social Engine API makes it quite easy for social application developers to add Privacy Editing handlers to different entities (i.e photos, blog posts, etc ...)

 Built following the Google Open Social Standards

Anahita Social Web Engine has been developed following the Google Open Social standards. Currently a person's profile contains most of the Google Open Social Fields, and every social app has a Profile Gadget View and a Canvas view. The Anahita project development is moving forward having the ability to run any Open Social compliant applications delivered via web in the future.

The Platform & Framework Overview

Anahita Social Engine™ has been developed using the Nooku Framework. This is the Open Source framework developed by the capable minds of our business associates at Joomlatools, Johan Janssens (former Lead Core Developers of Joomla! CMS) and Mathias Verraes (a very talented Software Architect). These are the same people who also brought us DOCman, LETTERman, and SITEman solutions.

In the mean time Anahita framework is using Joomla! CMS as a shell or host to contain the entire framework. In this setup, Joomla! is providing a state of Art Template Engine, Menu Manager, and Extensions Manager (Components, Plugins, Modules, and Languages ) with an architecture far superior to other similar technologies such as Drupal or BuddyPress which in fact lack an actual framework underneath.

Put your Social Web Infrastructure on the Cloud

For high traffic social web projects, Anahita Social Engine provides a seamless integration with the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and we could help you deploy your project using the Amazon Elastic Comput Cloud (EC2) technology.

Build a Social Web Eco-System for your Organization

No off the shelf solution could possibly meet all of your social web project requirements and those who claim they do, are not being honest with you!

On the other hand, using the combination of Anahita Social Engine™ and Nooku we are able to develop all kinds of loosely coupled and highly modular web solutions which range from Internationalized Content Management powered websites, Social Intranets, and other types of Social Applications for your small or large organization.

The great new is that of all of these technologies are offered under the GPL license which means you won't be locked into any sort of proprietary technologies and your budget won't be wasted on unfair licensing fees.

Our infrastructure also provides Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) enabling us to develop iPhone and Adobe AIR desktop applications that connect and interact with your social web infrastructure.

Project Contributors

Rastin Mehr, Lead Web Application Architect - rmd Studio

Ash Sanieyan, Lead Web Application Architect - Peerglobe Technology

Johan Janssens, Nooku Framework Lead Developer & Consultant, Joomlatools

Mathias Verraes, Nooku Framework Lead Developer & Consultant, Joomlatools 

Talia Cohen, Branding & Logo Design