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

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

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.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/
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