There are many reasons why the project has evolved in this direction; all clearly documented through my blog. Here are just 2:

1. Hibred social networking and group tools are failing people. The reason lies in basic sociology - Groups require unity, networks require diversity. Groups require coherence, networks require autonomy. Groups require privacy or segregation, networks require openness. Groups require focus of voice, networks require interaction. Our software was falling into this problem; our solution was to focus on an integrated group solution and a decentralized networking solution.

2. OpenID gives us a unique advantage; you can aquire 1 OpenID account and then login into many instances of our groups tool - not only can you do that, but you can carry your network from one group to another. OpenID is used by over 60 million people and there is good reason for that.

The software is downloadable by entering the site, clicking on the product to take you to the product page then clicking on the download button. The site itself is made using the groups product. An example of an OpenID profile site is at http://tom.calthrop.info

We give you a highly flexible groups product; fully customisable and we give people a set of products to maintain and Identity on the web; quickly log in to multple sites and to form decentralized social networks - Each product is codes to high 00 levels and is highly compact (a full groups suite including multi-person blog, wiki, wall and forum - all fully HTML, Javascript, PHP and CSS customisable for under 250KB) - fankenstein?

We are very poor when it comes to documentation. We welcome any contributions to assist us with correcting this.

This journalist did not contact any of the core developers nor the maintainer of the software before publishing this article.

The Barnraiser project is a GNU package free software project and we welcome any contributions or feedback. The project puts out nightly builds on all three products. Development is done daily and we would love people to get involved and become part of a free software development project.

Tom Calthrop (AROUNDMe maintainer) ... contact via http://tom.calthrop.info or through the forum at http://www.barnraiser.org/

Note to site - Maybe an article looking at our changes and why we did them would interest people?

Tom,

I spent the entire train trip from Hudiksvall to Gothenberg searching through your blog and the barnraiser.org site. I looked for anything that had to do with the original Aroundme software and read all that I could find on any changes made to your project. I found nothing that even hinted to what barnraiser is up to nowadays. Perhaps you could point some of the links to the information? This blog was in response to an email that said most of the links to Aroundme are broken. A reader trying to find the software became frustrated and said that we were writing about vaporware.

We would be happy to do a write up on the newer software projects. If you could send me your email address I will send you a set of questions concerning Aroundme project so that folk can get a clearer picture of the situation.