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Calling all code jockeys

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by doctordawg

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Why couldn't someone code up a program like bittorrent as social networking program. The program and all it's files (like my personal photos and blogs, and list of friends, etc.) live on MY computer and are available to share with anyone I give permission (i.e. make a friend), eliminating the middleman such as MySpace or FaceBook, and the inherent lack of control middlemen create, not not mention it would eliminate advertiser dancing monkeys in the margins.

My "profile" is available when I'm online, which with high speed internet is 24/7, unless I choose to go "offline". All my "friends" would be kinda like "seeds" that could be discovered, friended or blocked just like those big social websites. It could probably use a Mozilla engine to look a lot like a web page, but it's reading from peers' hard drives instead of a central server.

Someone's gonna go big with this someday. Maybe next Tuesday...

8 replies

by seanferd

It's called a "server". You can put some kind of content platform on the server.

P2P makes absolutely no sense for this. P2P means that some (eventually all) of your content would be "hosted" on every participating person's computer. See the problem with this model? (Or do you not know how P2P works?)

Now, if you just had some sort of content you wanted to share with friends, http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ .

by doctordawg

RetroShare, which I was unaware of, is really close to what I was thinking. No server. No middleman. Add a browser-like front end, like even simple email clients do, to post some words and maybe a picture or video of what you're thinking or doing, hosting it yourself like RetroShare, and you have FaceBook-like functionality without the FaceBook intrusion.

The P2P idea would be useful for speeding delivery of big files to and from all your friends. They'd have pieces of your big files distributed all around, relieving some of the pressure of ten friends downloading your Christmas video all at once from your little DSL connection. But they're your friends and you are theirs, so hosting a gig here or there wouldn't be all that intrusive. Sharing bandwidth would be a good thing. Maybe have some size limits so someone doesn't spread around a DV cam ten hour 100gb video. But, again, no central host controlling (or owning) your stuff. And the more friends you have, the more bandwidth you (and your friends) have.

I see a weakness with any Open Source thing: no champion, so getting a ton of people to use it would take a while, if at all.

by slayer_

That's why... You have a wide open connection to the entire world. That's just begging to be hacked.

by doctordawg

...been hacked at AOL and FaceBook, and an autorun file on a shared thumb drive. I don't run any opt-in program on FaceBook, ever. When friends invite me and it requests my info be shared, I always say no. Somehow my FaceBook photo (exclusive to FaceBook) is now at CNN as my avatar. I didn't share it, but there it is.

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