[Freedombox-discuss] Bootstrapping a userbase (or: killer app)

[Matt G.]

My personal interest in freedombox is to find/create applications which are
immediately desirable by a large percentage of the population. In the way
that the spreadsheet application bootstrapped the PC industry, I believe we
can find a freedombox application that will drive proliferation of the
platform.

What could that application be?

I see a few criteria:
  1) It must be standalone. It cannot depend on an already-existing
freedombox userbase (since we don't have one).
   2) It must appeal to a broad swath of the earth's population. Niche
applications are nice, but the goal is to get as many people as possible.
To do so, we must have broad appeal.
  3) It must appeal to users in modern democratic countries who already
posess a relatively large amount of internet freedom. This could be hugely
controversial, but see [1] below for my hand-waving argument.
  4) It must align with freedombox's strengths and weaknesses. Nothing CPU
or bandwidth intensive. Focus on managing sensitive information that an
average person would like to keep within their own grasp.
  5) It must be relatively simple to implement. For example, creating an
online office suite at-par with Google docs would require such a large
amount of labor as to be impossible. It must be do-able by an extremely
small group of people, possibly just one.

So, any ideas coming to you? If you have suggestions, please send them
along to me!

The two ideas I have spent some time thinking about are:

mint.com replacement. Freedombox would pull user's financial status from
various institutions and present it to them in an aggregated form. Users
could view spending trends, create budgets, etc. It would appeal to anybody
who is interested in managing their money (almost everybody on earth). It
aligns with freedombox's strengths because it protects some of the most
sensitive data in any person's life. The biggest complaint people have with
mint.com is that they do not want to trust their financial data to a 3rd
party. It is theoretically easy to implement. Obviously the biggest
implementation obstacle would be enabling it to seamlessly pull data from a
variety of financial institutions. It could be killed if a majority of
financial institutions do not provide the user an open API for pulling
their data. People might say, "Why not use GnuCash?" First, GnuCash runs as
a traditional application on my PC and cannot offer "cloud" features such
as mobile device access, email alerts, etc. Second, GnuCash's data import
functionality does not work well and thus fails requirement #2 above.
mint.com's automated data importing works quite well.

Cloud-based email (gmail) replacement. Freedombox would host the user's
domain and act as primary email exchanger. They would need a friend with a
freedombox who they trust to act as a secondary mail exchanger as well as
store backups and serve the UI in the case that the primary box went
offline. There are a number of technical challenges: 1) how to simplify the
process of buying and configuring a domain name. Average user should not
have to do anything more than type in the name they want, and their payment
information. 2) How to automatically manage failover to the secondary
device in the event of internet link failure of the first device. Some
heartbeat between the two devices would be required. 3) CPU-intensive
processes such as spam filtering and search indexing. Would perhaps require
user to buy a freedombox with a beefier CPU & storage.

Secure chat is an application that many people have thrown out there as a
good first step for freedombox, but I think it fails criteria #1 and #2
from above. It requires an existing userbase, and it does not appeal to a
broad swath of the earth's population. 99% of the population is perfectly
happy to use facebook chat, gchat, etc. and do not perceive any value added
by secure person-to-person chat.
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