right tools and incentives

People want to share and collaborate with each other. They don’t want their creative content to be encumbered by conditions of some private enterprise (who may have other ideas for their data). They want to be part of a global social network but don’t want to be subjected to just any data flying by.

So here we work on a unified tool for:

• sharing creative output: pictures, blog and journal entries, music.
• forming groups and expressing relationships between them.
• manage people and projects, denote friend relationships
• earn a livelihood: receive merit or other goods for their efforts

STUB

infrastructure:

• support the storing of users’ content
• the allocation of storage and computational resources taking into account availability for popular content
• karma currency

STUB

The application is expected to be a peer-2-peer application facilitating a natural linking between user-created content and friend relationships (we naturally form our relationships in a peer-2-peer manner; why shouldn’t our social software be?). In addition, arbitrary groupings can be proposed and established, creating conversation and data-sharing arenas. Trust would be assumed among such groupings.

This achitecture also fosters dis
as well as fostering a distributed “meta”-application. Pictures, blog/journal entries, music, all kept in the Garden (an abstract cloud made with you and your trusted friend’s computers). No more walled gardens!
To further elaborate, is should be noted that User’s computers typically have incredibly wasted storage and unused computational power (typically 90% unused). We’ll use some of it and spare the overhead of large server farms and that way be able to scale up to millions of users with little effort (perhaps using Freenet as a backbone). In this way, also the beginnings of a new web economy could start being generated. Freenet is being User content (pictures, journal entries/blogs, music, etc) will be kept on the user’s computer, various protocols to be used for redundancy and reliability (cf. FreeNEt

Incentives. The visual interface into the vast network will be nicely visualizable and easy to navigate.

Reed’s Law: The power of a social network where groups can easily be formed grows exponentially faster than (Metcalf’s) N-squared networking law.