And Pete's point is: What hardware? This idea could potentially be run on no-centralised-hardware which, last time I checked, cost no pounds. Anything you add is just to grease the wheels a little.

To put it another way: Dan's talking about creating a very robust 'enterprise level' 'server solution'. Which is nothing like what Pete's talking about, which is a decentralised, distributed (possibly p2p but that's pretty much beside the point) ad-hoc network.

 

Or to put it yet another way: Dan's suggesting a hardware solution to Pete's software problem.

You're assuming that everyone will want to set up a NAS or something similar in their home. But there are plenty of people (I'm thinking of the people in my office who panic when a new version of Internet Explorer gets installed) who don't/won't want that. Christ, I wouldn't want that (I would really, but just to make a point) - I pay enough for electricity as it is.

Even if you (as a company running this social network) does some coding magic to integrate things like Flickr, Picasa, ect and makes it look seamless, you're still going to have to pay those sites for access to their hardware. Especially if you're going to bring millions of new customers to them.

Basically, especially when you scale up to millions (tens of millions) of users, someone's going to have to pay for hardware somewhere along the line.

So where is the data stored? In terms of things like photos? On people's computers? It has to be stored /somewhere/.

I'll be honest and say I don't 'get' or understand it all. I'm not trying to be overly cynical, I just don't see a way it could be reliably implemented on the same scale as Facebook.

 

I don't see how grandpa Jones is going to get his photos to his grandkids using his swanky new iPhone.

 

I'm very much sticking with the Facebook analogy as it's frigging huge and surely the point of any social service is to get the masses involved.

I'm not assuming that at all. I'm saying if that's how things pan out then that makes it even easier.

It doesn't need 'everyone' to do that, just enough people. And people are doing it anyway because of privacy/property concerns.

But that's beside the point. It doesn't need that to work.

It would work similarly to TOR or Freenet or even BitCoin or, from another angle, Wuala.

It's nothing to do with Flickr and Picasa and so on - it supersedes those things, it doesn't talk to them (though it could - you don't have to pay flickr to link to their site :? )

It would (and this is the zero-hardware-cost version I'm describing, this is the extreme) be decentralised and distributed. There would be no server aside from all the clients. It could work in various ways ranging from people voluntarily donating a portion of their hard drive or running a server app on a spare machine to.. the client doing that automatically. But either way, each node would contain an encrypted portion of the network's content and access would be intelligently routed between these nodes.

That's it. Obviously there's no detail there and things could be done in hundreds of ways - large content could still be hosted more traditionally using established services and so on. That's all detail.

You could add a central server into that to improve routing early on and... even for something with a lot of traffic a simple rented dedicated server could handle that task.

You can argue that people would object to donating disk space and... that's a hard one to argue before someone tries it, but I doubt it. It wouldn't be much. And I'm sure people who cared about such things would donate entire servers (which would simply mean running the software and allocating as much HDD space as they wanted to) to the project - the same as people run gaming servers for no obvious gain other than they care.

All it'd take is one machine to get rolling. Then when that starts to get slow you'd have enough users that at least one of them would say "I like this service, I'll run the software on my PC to keep it fast" and so on and so on. (That's assuming you don't force every client to be a small server, which is the simplest solution).

Yeah, on people's computers.

You're saying "Facebook is Centralised so this can only work centralised". Go read up on Freenet and its successors and TOR and so on.

Yeah, I get all that. And it's a really good idea.

 

But, if you're going to be directing millions of people through Flickr's website (as an example), they've got to pay for the hardware and bandwidth it uses, and they're most likely to pass the costs on to the company responsible for all that extra traffic.

 

Mind you, don't ask me how to handle the authentication and user database across a distributed platform. That kind of encryption makes my head hurt.

But that's what Flickr do. That's like saying Flickr should charge Google because Google directs a lot of traffic to Flickr. Flickr want traffic.

If we're talking about scraping Flickr's info without going to the site then that's a different thing. But we're not.

The routing and encryption stuff is eye-wateringly complex, aye. But there are already far more robust solutions for that than this would need. This would only need to be as secure as the current web services are (not very secure at all). Anything on top of that would be an added benefit.

The major problem is that routing through a dynamic network of nodes is not currently going to be as fast as a simple web server. But, well, that is done currently through a distributed system currently (DNS) so that's probably solvable.

Surely, for the sake of keeping a consistent look-and-feel across your social network, you'd want to scrape Flickr's data and put it into your format.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that's how it's been done previously when everyone's trying to establish 'a brand'. But this wouldn't be that. Or wouldn't have to be, at least. I think people are smart enough to cope with some things looking different from others (Google+ and Facebook don't look the same but I manage to cope).

Having said that, if this thing took off I'm sure Flickr would be happy to provide an API whereby we could get pictures + ads + their logo somewhere from them and frame it how we like. Works out better for them because they're displaying their ads with less server load.

This could go two ways - it could be like the thing Pete described before where it simply points to where people have their information stored, or it could entirely replace those places and store everything locally.

Or it could do both. Or whatever.

Wasn't part of the point of this to not have adverts?

 

Edit: Yes, my replies are getting shorter. Can you tell I'm starting to wonder what point I'm arguing?

It wouldn't. Not that I care, I use adblock.

If someone wants to share photos via flickr then their users will see adverts from flickr via our thing. If they don't then they can use something else. Again, this is assuming it even plugs into existing services at all, which is unnecessary.

So do I. Except on certain sites, cos I'm nice like that. But you did mention getting an API from Flickr that gives us the photos and adverts. But that's just an example, and hypothetical, so I'm not sure how much further this can go.

 

If it doesn't use existing services, then we're back to people storing their stuff in "our" cloud, which would be other people's PC and servers. At which point most of the world will object because they don't understand/don't care what encryption does, and they don't understand that it's almost the same as using iCloud but the data isn't stored by Apple.

Doesn't really matter if they object. So long as enough understand and don't object. Game servers are a good example. There are plenty of those for all the people who want to play, most of whom probably don't know or care that that's some real person running the software on their server just to be nice.

Game servers don't hold your personal data. I suppose at this point the discussion changing to be about how you'd market the service: easily enough dumbed down to explain, but there'd still be a huge number of people who get half of the concept and then think "But what if photos of my grandchildren end up on the computer of some pedo?" Assuming they survived me trying to kill them for not knowing how to spell paedo, they'd just not use it rather than look into it any further.

Yeah I was just commenting on people's willingness to donate without getting any payment/recognition.

Marketing is... a whole other discussion :Y

Or they'd select the option saying "use local storage" instead of the one saying "use encrypted distributed storage", and then there's no worry.

The point of this is, there doesn't need to be one way.

Facebook (and G+ and everyone) enforce their fixed way onto people, and people have no choice but to put up with it (or not use the service, and thus not be able to communicate with people across the globe).

Doing it right means providing people with the ability to have things their own way - and that includes whether you store your photos on your home machine, or on an encrypted peer-to-peer network, or on your ISP's space, or on your flickr account, or on a dedicated server, or on a cloud data store, or on a corporate VPN, or wherever the photo sharer chooses.

Computers are supposed to fit around human's needs; so people choose what they want to do, and it's the software's job to do that as seamlessly as possible.

And that doesn't need any one entity to spend lots of money on flashy hardware.

I think you're great Peter (heart)