[Freedombox-discuss] Do we need a UI/UX Expert?
2011/8/12 Bjarni R?nar Einarsson <bre at pagekite.net>:
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> >> web server and a set of like minded peers.
>> >
>> > Yes indeed. :-)
>>
>> >> That said there's a hell of a lot you can do with a plain old apache
>> You could start something as simple as this (pseudocode):
>>
>> $friends = $me->getCircle('friends');
>>
>> foreach ($friend in $friends) {
>> ?curl -T message.html $friend->getMessageInbox();
>> }
>>
>> and you've pretty much got a distributed, text based version of
>> facebook, using nothing more than a web server, a file system, and web
>> standards, you can even add your public key to curl for extra security
>>
>> not really something for the mass market but quite easy to achieve for
>> someone sufficiently technical
>>
>> however, if you start simple you can work hard on improving the user
>> experience over time
>
> You might be interested in Thimbl:? http://www.thimbl.net/
>
> It's a pretty cool project that motivated me to add support for the finger
> protocol (of all things!) to PageKite. :-)
>
> However, realistically, you want something a little more structured - your
> getMessageInbox() function would probably pull an RSS feed Atom/OStatus over
> HTTPS, and getCircle could operate off a local FOAF file (for example).
> Doing this sort of thing in a public way is almost trivial these days, all
> the protocols and tools exist.
>
> Doing it in a privacy-friendly way, where messages can have a limited set of
> recipients and privacy is, if not guaranteed (things can always be copied),
> at least a default behavior of respecting privacy wishes (and a standard way
> to express those wishes) is something that hasn't really been finished yet.
> But people *are* working on it...
>
> But this is drifting far from the original topic of UI/UX - which is
> actually a pretty important one. But again, there is lots of prior
> "research" (Facebook, Diaspora, Google Plus, ...) which can and should be
> reused.
Quick reply to this, so as not to be off topic. My illustration was
simply that you can hack a pretty decent distributed social net
together with a just few lines of code and a webserver. You dont need
really Ostatus, that's delegated credentials to an API, we can go
direct server to server, tho nothing stops you using tokens.
getCircle is an easy lookup from your friend list (e.g. FOAF) which
can be publically or privately stored / access controlled
getMessageInbox is simply a folder that allows you to post a file
using curl -T (this is the read/write web which the www was designed
to be but most people use it in the client/server mode)
As you say it's a work in progress but most of the hard parts are complete.
Yes lots of good UI's around, including Thimbl, I've followed that for
quite a while.
>
> --
> Bjarni R. Einarsson
> Founder, lead developer of PageKite.
>
> Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/
>
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