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Thinking Differently About Free Network Services, Part I

So in the previous post I posed the question of What if we could have both the decentralization advantages of personal computers and the network effects of the internet and Web2.0, but without the centralization of Big Data?

In this post I'd like to explore the idea of personal web applications - web apps that individual users could control for themselves, but which enable them to access their data from anywhere and control who else had access to it?

In a way I'm describing the Internet again.

What if web apps could be as easy to install as desktop apps?

Installation - Shell access - Capistrano - Python virtual environment.

Wordpress

What about easy-to-install web apps that uses can control, and which sync together. Sorta like the personal computer but for web apps. centralized > decentralized > centralized > ?

My vision:

• instead of using services like GMail or Facebook, users use personal server apps.

these apps will do things like * webmail * blogging * microblogging * IM gateway (Jabber?) * profile (as easy to edit as Facebook) * photo gallery * bookmarking * OpenID server * whatever else we think of * manage friends list/permissions * file dropbox * tinyURL service

these apps would have RSS feedreaders and other scrapers that would connect to your friends' pages or your server would manage your social graph the way Facebook does now. It would connect to your friends' servers directly and give you a Wall-like feed of what they're up to.

The difference is that it would be private to you and under your control rather than some company. Your social graph would be your business and your property.

for any piece of content, you could decide if you want it to be public, friends/family-only, or private. Or maybe even give access to individuals. That way, social graph web services could harvest the info that you make public and provide aggregation services.

You could grant permission to certain uses of your content.

For this to happen, server apps would need to be as easy to install as desktop apps. - install on a media server that lives at your home. - desktop that manages the install process. - simple web-based install

Still security problems - it's easier for the gov't to knock over an individual's server app than to knock over Google's.