What if you could make your site part of a social network with a single click? Without having to create a new account, without having to give private information to a third party, where your site is the only account you'll ever need and where you could socialize virtually with anyone while you are in complete control of your privacy and your content?

Minerva was designed with a simple goal in mind: to let anyone be a part of a global ad-hoc social network. Basically once your site has Minerva capabilities you are in a social network. Your own social network! Your site becomes your account and your're free to do whatever you wish. With a single click!
If you don't want to waste time Try it right now.

The past and present shows us that people want to be connected and thus, there are many social networks that you can be a part of. Unfortunately there are some shortcomings that plague almost any social network no matter how big or famous is. And they affect YOU, their user. Minerva gives you a solution that makes your virtual social life easier and independent.

With Minerva your site is the only account you'll ever need

When you join a social network you have to create an account. This means yet another username/password, secret answer etc to remember for each social network. Then you have to give some private information about yourself, setup your profile, add your friends, some pictures maybe, tell the world about what you like etc, you know the drill. And you have to do this for every social network you join.

Minerva removes this hassle. You already have your site (usually a blog) with this kind of information on it. Why duplicate it when you can use it as it is? You just login on your own site and all the Minerva enabled sites will recognize you as a Minerva user .

Keep your private information to yourself. Minerva helps you protect your privacy

When you setup your profile on a classic social network, you have to share some private information about yourself. Usually your name , your location and your birthday, but some ask for more detailed information. Why should you tell them information about who you are, where you live, how much you earn in a year, your education, who are your friends and what you like to buy, just to name a few things the company behind that social network will know about you? Don't you get enough spam? As time passed by the average social network wants to know more and more about you, storing your information and your behaviours. Why?

Minerva doesn't require any of this. That's because your site is your account and thus you decide in the first place what private information to share. You are in control of your privacy.

Not only that, but you control anything that you or someone else can do on your site. Although many social networks allow their users to customize their profile, the keyword here is allow. You can do whatever you are allowed to do and nothing more.

With Minerva you are socially unrestricted

Let's say you have an account on a social network. Let's say a friend tells you about another cool social network that he wants you to join. You have to create an account on that network. And setup your page and add your friends again and give private information to yet another company.

How about just click 'Join network' and that's it? Yes, that's all the effort Minerva requires from you. Oh and if you want to leave that network it's another click. Or better yet, create your own network and lead your own community. It takes just a few seconds and a few clicks.

It's Free and Open Source

Everybody is welcome to contribute to Minerva, either by feedback or coding.

Initially Minerva was intended to be a Wordpress plugin, but why should we restrict it to one platform? So, actually Minerva is made up of 2 parts: Minerva Core and Minerva Adapter. The Core provides the functionality and is independent of the hosting application while the adapter provides the bridge between Minerva Core and the host.

This means that any site can be Minerva enabled as long as there is an adapter for it. At this moment there is only the Wordpress adapter aka Minerva Wordpress plugin, but in time there will be adapters (read: plugins) for your favourite CMS / blog engine (right now php based, in the near future also .net).

How it works

In a nutshell, once you are logged in, Minerva starts its own session. That session is then passed on to any other site you wish to visit. However, to accomplish this you need to reach that site by a special link that redirects you to it. Behind the scenes, Minerva contacts the destination site and transmits your session to it. This works only with other Minerva enabled sites.

This Wordpress plugin adds Minerva capabilites to your Wordpress powered blog. It comes as a widget but you can use it in a non-widgetized theme as well.

Requirements

• Wordpress 2.5 or later
• Php 5.2.x with php-curl and php-xml extensions.

Install

Unzip it into the wp-content/plugins folder. After you activate the plugin you should see the Minerva tab on the Wordpress admin and clicking on it should list the existing networks. Don't forget to visit Minerva Blog for news, tips & tricks .

I appreciate and welcome any feedback, be it constructive criticism, suggestions for new features, bug reports or just some nice things you want to say.

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