the decentralized social web

The idea

As I mentioned before, one good solution of the current fundamental privacy problems might be the use of a decentralized social web. The idea isn’t new but the talk on Freedom in the Cloud by Eben Moglen on February 2nd 2010, outlined the broader context that was needed to understand the puzzle of problems.

As a direct reaction to the talk, the Diaspora projects now starts taking off and already collected >10 times the amount of money they asked for.

However, both Diaspora and Eben Moglen don’t mention one of the major crucial problems: The accessibility of the huge amount of data we collect from our friends and us.

The semantic web and the so called “triple-store” provide the technology to store all the information in one place with the huge possibility to combine data in ways we never thought of before. However, what is still missing is the easy access to all information in such a triple-store.

But before we come to possible solutions, let us imagine the “Mensch-Maschine”, the cyborg, us IT-humans, in ten years.

The device

In ten years, we might have a device we can carry around, that constantly accumulates information’s about what we are doing. It stores the streets and ways we walk, it continuously takes pictures of our environment, records audio, recognizes text, speech, music, voices and faces. We then can review the menu from the Asia restaurant, just because we looked at it. We can always roll-back in time and access a moment we missed, or forgot. And that is the main point, our forgetfulness. Who would not like to have device that remembers for you? Because we are obviously not able to handle it all?! Imagine you could always access the “memories” of your childhood.

You can build such a device already, it might be a bit clumsy and and less fancy, but all the components and technologies are available.

In the ideal world, such a device is only accessible to us and we can always decide what we want to share and what not. Also, if Catherine shares some information with Jules, only Jules should be able to read it, and not Jim.

With sharing and the semantic web the device starts to unfold the full potential. The device will not just store the information about us, but also provide us with the data we got from our friends. The combined data might unfold a view of the world, we never saw before. More or less directly with the eyes from our friends.

The possibility of such a device should make clear how fundamentally important the discussion about privacy in the social network is.

The first step

But what is possible now? What could be the outcome of the Diaspora project?

The Diaspora project might provide two essential features:

  • a combined storage of all our “social data” under our direct control
  • a encrypted decentralized network to share social data

The combined data store, at best a triple-store, holds the potential to a new way to access information’s about our friends and us. We no longer have to visit multiple websites, go through our RSS reader, check e-mails, IM and micro-blogging - instead everything gets accumulated into one storage. To access the information’s we want, we apply filters. We select a group of people, set a time-frame and get all updates from the different sources.

The current web technologies make it possible to provide easy access to data, but they hardly scale as soon as the amount of data gets bigger. Long lists of micro blogging messages are very hard to go through without the proper context.

The proper context, or ways of accessing information’s are very easy to outline.

  • a person
  • a group of people
  • a location
  • a topic / tag / keyword
  • the link between these elements

Future applications should provide the functionality to focus on a certain context. The view should be different if we select a person, a group or a location. If we select a location, we want to see what persons and topics are related to it. However, we want to see a map, not a long lists of elements.

The second step

The fact that a decentralized social web will store the information’s on the users hard disk, holds the possibility for dynamic desktop applications. Such a application could go beyond the current web techniques and try new ways of visualizing the semantic web.

I have specific ideas about such a desktop application and hope that i can bring them into some sort of a visual demo. Hopefully in another post.

Three steps ahead

What else? The open source aspect of the Diaspora project will not prevent the commercial copycats. With the resources of bigger companies, it might even be possible to outrun the project, provide a “even nicer” user interface, or certain specific functionality. However, the open source world has learned a lot in the last 10 years. People “demanded” a proper web browser and Mozilla was born. If people keep demanding a direct control over their data and actually have the alternatives, sites like Facebook might never surface again.

Or let my rephrase that: Your data should have the same cultural and legal protection as your body. You better demand that.