[Freedombox-discuss] Do we need a UI/UX Expert?

[Melvin Carvalho]

2011/8/12 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson <bre at pagekite.net>:
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> > In the bullet points above, the labels "account", "profiles",
>> > "contacts",
>> > "guests", "wall", "status" "photos" and "videos", "groups", "members",
>> > "followers" and "follows"  create well known mental models,
>> > i.e. everybody
>> > knows what UX sits behind those labels. As long as FBX uses these will
>> > known
>> > labels and when we do absolutely need to introduce our own labels use
>> > words
>> > with well-known concepts behind them, e.g. secret and confidential ;),
>> > then
>> > we should be fine. In the list above, I included Googles "circles"
>> > because I
>> > assume that label offers better privacy than Facebooks "lists" and FBX
>> > is
>> > privacy first.
>>
>> Sounds like an awesome feature set and I would love to see something like
>> this.
>>
>> However even to create a Facebook clone is estimated at 500 man years of
>> work.
>>
>>
>> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/03/fyi-google-facebook%E2%80%99s-former-cto-says-it-would-take-two-years-for-250-people-to-build-a-clone/
>
> One thing to keep in mind, is that a large amount of the work that Facebook
> and the big players have to do, has to do with scalability and redundancy,
> problems caused by a centralized infrastructure.  They also have a lot of
> policing and accounting work, and of course all the overhead caused by
> building systems to support their business model (ads, metrics, etc.).
>
> Self-hosting with a device like the FreedomBox avoids those problems
> entirely, which simplifies many aspects of the problem.  Plus, we can freely
> build on their experience and emulate those aspects of their UI which make
> sense.
>
> So although still a hard problem, we are almost certainly not talking about
> another 500 man years.
>
>> That said there's a hell of a lot you can do with a plain old apache
>> web server and a set of like minded peers.
>
> Yes indeed. :-)

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

>
> --
> Bjarni R. Einarsson
> Founder, lead developer of PageKite.
>
> Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/
>