I’ve officially joined the Osmosoft team today. Osmosoft is all about open source and web technologies, so it’s a great fit. I’m looking forward to working in a talented, hands-on, team in a startup-like culture.

Osmosoft began as an acquisition, when BT brought in Jeremy Ruston and his TiddlyWiki product. The team continues to work on TiddlyWiki and related products such as RippleRap, in addition to guiding BT on open source strategy. Last week, Jeremy announced BT is joining FOSSBazaar, an open source community whose other partners include Google, HP, Novell, and SourceForge.

As for my limited TiddlyWiki experience, I have previously looked at some of the code - while writing Ajax Patterns in 2005 I mined parts of the code for Ajax patterns. At some point in 2006, I ported podca.st to use a modified TiddlyWiki I found somewhere, which allowed user edits, though spamming forced me to restore the original silly static HTML version (there are now other solutions for server-side TiddlyWiki hosting).

In its main form, TiddlyWiki runs off a file: URL, which means it enjoys extra privileges not afforded to typical web apps, and exploiting them effectively raises a lot of unusual challenges. I’m also very interested in TiddlyWeb: “a practical, readable, reference implementation of a rigorously designed headless wiki server that may use TiddlyWiki as a user interface”. This is effectively a RESTful wiki API.

What I’m doing at Osmosoft (unlikely to be OpenSocial related) - and to what extent it involves TiddlyWiki - is still being scoped. Watch this space. Regardless, I’ll still be involved - as a separate activity - with OpenSocial and BT’s OpenSocial and widgets strategy.