[Lancaster] Maybe help others and maybe expand the Linux network ...discuss ? maybe logic ?

[Andy Baxter]

On Sat, 2006-08-12 at 19:51 +0100, sam wrote:

> 2, Is there an open source version of myspace - except downloadable -
> abit like limewire but with an ID and instantl messaging ? No it's an
> idea i just have no idea how to make it, though i think there is
> worthy millage there,   why myspace.com ? - could any other network ?
> 
> 3, One obvious way in i thought for the students was to get them
> started on a myspace.com for several reasons gets them on the
> computer, starts them learning code, in a fun, ish way, And it helps
> advertise the generic website to sell our new products, web banners,
> music, art, programming, anything Good.

I've been thinking a bit about this idea. The way I see it, there are
(at least) two issues here:

- a social issue - what is it that brings people to myspace? is it the
friends-network - being able to invite other people to read your blog /
listen to your music / view your pics etc etc. Or is it the image that's
created by the people who run the site, and the freebies / reviews / etc
that they provide? I.e. how much of what attracts people to it is
created by the members and how much by the company that runs myspace?
What I'm getting at here is how much do people value the things that
come from it being a single big site, as against the things that come
from it being a more peer to peer network of friends?

SOme of it I guess is the 'success breeds success' thing - lots of
people have heard of it so people want to be part of it, but there must
be something that keeps people joining. Another thing here is that
myspace is (I've heard) owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Sun - does
he want to use this site to have political influence in the same way as
he does with his newspapers or is he just out to make money?

Personally I'm not that interested in trying to replicate myspace as it
is, as most of the pages I've seen there (not many) don't really
interest me - it seems to be mostly about people trying to be cool and
gossipping / chatting about their lives, rather than really trying to
say something. That's more about the culture of that site though rather
than what I'm thinking about here which is more about what is the value
of big sites like this in general compared to more distributed systems?

The thing that started me off thinking about this is I've been
considering starting a blog, as a way of talking about things that
interest me and maybe making some friends online. I've thought of
running wordpress on my own server, but the trouble with this is you
don't get the connections and feeling of community that you get with
bigger sites like livejournal which a friend of mine uses - standalone
blogs like this tend to be more about promoting your own ideas rather
than being part of a conversation.

So the question for me is how do you make the same feeling of
community / shared conversation with a system that's running on a
network of small servers rather than a single server?

- which brings me on to the technical issue - this isn't likely to be an
easy thing to do. Running off a single server makes things much easier
technically, because you can store all the user data on a single
database. E.g. when someone logs in and wants to view one of their
friend's blog entries and add comments to it, the server can easily
verify that they are who they say they are because they've already
logged in, and a record of this will be kept on the database. Also it
makes it easier to have unique login names - the server will already
have a record of all the names that have been used. I'm not saying this
is impossible, just that it needs thinking about.

One way to go with this would be to create a fairly open protocol / file
format for exchanging data between servers which could be used by a
variety of different applications to share information. E.g. suppose you
had a blog, and a photo gallery running on a server which you either run
yourself or which is run by someone you trust. (This server could have
several other people on it.) A friend of yours has a blog and and some
music he's recorded on another server. You would be able to email them a
file which is a key that lets them view your photos, or do things like
commenting on your blog. This needn't be tied to a specific application
- it would be an open protocol that various different apps could
piggyback on top of to share data with other similar apps. E.g. a plugin
could be written for wordpress that lets one wordpress server talk to
another, or to other blog servers. The hard thing here would be make
this secure. It's probably possible using public key encryption (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography ), but would need
careful thought to get it right. I don't want to go any further with
this at the moment because (a) it's late and (b) I'm trying to keep my
mind on the stuff I'm working on at the moment - I just had this on my
mind from thinking about it and I wanted to see what other people
thought. If you're interested in stuff like this, have a look at:
http://www.altruists.org/projects/ge/ff/

andy.