Gravity, a company that provides “interest graphs” based on content visited by users has announced Gravity Labs.
Gravity Labs is, as CTO Jim Benedetto puts it, “an initial peek into our underlying interest graph infrastructure as well as a showcase of some of our Open Source projects.”
Some of the Labs projects are open source, others are merely peeks into the stats behind Gravity’s service. For example, check out the metrics page. It’s good if you want to see the live metrics of Gravity Network data, number of signals processed on a given day, or number of requests that Gravity is processing per second.
Gravity Labs Video 1 from Gravity Labs on Vimeo.
Gravity is also showing a graph by audience interest, which shows “targetable interests” for the past seven days. Right now, nearly 40% of the audience is interested in science topics. Nearly 30% of the audience are interested in politics and government. Health (the bottom-ranked category displayed on the site) comes in with just 0.78%. Sadly, bacon does not have its own category, or it would no doubt dominate.
Open Source Efforts
What’s most interesting about Labs, though, is the code that they’re putting out for other folks to use.
So far, they’ve released HPaste, Highroller, and Goose. All of the software released so far is under the Apache 2.0 License.
HPaste provides a Scala interface to HBase for writing MapReduce jobs in Hadoop against HBase tables.
Highroller is a PHP wrapper for the Highcharts JavaScript library. Note that while Highroller is open source, Highcharts is not. It’s available under the CC BY-NC 3.0 license, which means it can be used without cost for non-commercial projects but a paid license is required for commercial projects.
Finally, there’s Goose, which is used to “take any news article or article type web page and not only extract what is the main body of the article but also all meta data and most probable image candidate.” You can see a demo on the Labs site.
Gravity’s open source projects have actually been on GitHub well before the announcement of Labs earlier this week. Goose has been forked more than 70 times and has 650 watchers as of this writing.
What prompted the open source efforts? Benedetto says that Gravity wants to open source as much software as possible, with the exception of software that’s “core” to the business. Outside of that, Benedetto says that the company “leverages a significant amount of open source” and wants to give back where it can.
The Labs effort from Gravity is interesting, even if you’re not directly working with the company. It’d be nice to see more companies opening their doors a bit, particularly when it comes to releasing software that could be re-used by other organizations.
