VieSurIP

Saturday, September 26th 2015,

The Internet has evolved a lot in the last 5 years. In 2009, using online services meant trusting third-party services to keep your data safe. For example Facebook knew everything about your activities and your friends, Google Docs had all the documents you collaborated to, Gmail had all your emails… All these services had quite unclear terms of services. They claimed that they wouldn’t use your data in wrong ways but they used it to display targeted ads. And you could never be sure that they wouldn’t lose your data or get hacked. This trust problem made difficult to use cloud services systematically, though their advantages were becoming obvious.

Now this problem has been at least partly fixed thanks to Internet Service Providers. My situation is very common: I have a very fast and symmetrical optical fiber connection. My Freebox v8, my new Internet box, is always connected to the Internet and includes a server that hosts all my personal data and data from other members of my family. Our family computer, my personal notebook, my Jolicloud netbook and my IPhone are constantly synchronized to the hard disk of our Freebox (through our private network or through the Internet).

The server of the Freebox consists mainly of an HTTP server with a web interface, and many APIs. A web interface is available for each member of the family at http://nickname.free.fr. Mine is at http://twisterss.free.fr. It resembles a personal blog with many social features.

This URL also is the key to my digital life. It is used by many websites to access the APIs of my Freebox using OAuth. Facebook stores the messages, links, pictures and videos I share on my Freebox using these APIs. My freebox has the authorizations to access data of my friends too. They all have an unique URL like mine, giving acces to the same APIs. First Facebook didn’t want to use this architecture because it made them lose control over the data of their users, but seeing new competitors growing rapidly using this new architecture made them change their mind. Now they even have developed a proprietary plugin with a special API extension that is more rapid and makes more features available than the default one. I could install it on my freebox in one click, but I prefer the default open-source one, as I’m not really sure what the closed-source Facebook plugin does. Now the value of Facebook is in the way they sort data to show the most interesting, and in all the third-party applications available to manage one’s digital life. And they don’t have to pay for the huge servers they used to have for pictures and video uploads, as they are directly sent from the user’s server.

Google uses this architecture a lot too: it searches both in my friends’ data and on the Internet, and can even tell me when some friends made searches related to mine (if they agreed to make it public, obviously). As Facebook, they propose a proprietary plugin that indexes data more efficiently. Jolicloud uses my private server to synchronize apps and files on all my netbooks, and to propose me applications my friends like.

With this architecture, users have a much better control over their data, as it is stored on their private server, and most of the time only meta data is sent to the websites (links and descriptions for Google or Facebook…). All data is synchronized on all computers, so it can be restored if a hard disk fails. Data sharing is made much more efficient and fast as it isn’t sent to a central server. But this architecture isn’t perfect: if users install malicious plugins on their box, or if they give access to their data to any website through OAuth, then their privacy is still threatened.

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Many people who have blogs say that it’s their main social network. They interact with the commentators. They discover their blogs and enlarge their network of interesting blogs.

The interesting fact about blogs is that they aren’t centralized. So the blogger controls the information it publishes. Whereas in Facebook, only Facebook controls the information you publish. I think that with a few more functions and a dedicated interface, blogs could replace Facebook.

More opened an decentralized discussions

When someone starts a discussion on a blog, it would be interesting if other bloggers could continue the discussion in both their blog, and the original blog. Trackbacks are used for that now, but they are very too limited.

The best would be that your comment on the original blog transforms into a post in your blog, ande discussion would then continus simultaneously in both blogs. The audiences of both blogs would be merged and the discussions would become more interesting.

A Facebook-like administration panel

Many blogs already have a list of top commentators, a list of the most interesting blogs… But to transform a blog into a social network, we would need a list of commentators like the list of firends in Facebook.

It would be interesting too to be able to follow from the administration panel the last posts in the commentators’ blogs, like a Facebook news feed.

Plugins to manage pictures, events… would easily replace the most interesting Facebook functions. And we would have a decentralized network, where the users could control their data.

We could too imagin a platform like Wordpress.com that would allow you to create a social blog as easily as you now create a Facebook profile. Myspace or Skyblog have features that look like social blogs, but they don’t allow to host a blog on an external host, or to have decentralized discussions.

Realisation?

I’m hesitating to create a wordpress plugin and perhaps a small social blogs platform. Perhaps ideas like that already exist?

Il est évident que cette vision des blogs ne serait pas adaptée à tous les blogs : les blogs thématiques par exemple n’ont pas grand chose à voir avec les réseaux sociaux.

Obviously social blogs couldn’t completly replace all usual blogs, but only the ones focused on the blogger.

But I think blogs could be a more interesting, more open, and more secure social network than Facebook, because we could use our own host for our data.

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This website is one of the first websites I have created.

History

The firstversion looked very bad: there were animated GIFs and frames that gave the website a very unprofessional look. Sadly I haven’t any screenshot of this version.

The second version was a bit better: I had discovered PHP, that allowed me to replace the frames by includes. But my free host didn’t provide any database, so all pages were saved in text files.

This architecture didn’t ease the modifications I had to do: generation of an RSS feed, creation of a simple administration interface, change of design…

Present state

A few years ago, I changed of free host, and I rebuilt completly the website to use a database and a homemade template system. I changed the design too (but the present design is still far from being XHTML valid).

You can see the website of “Le fil à soi” in its present version.

Conclusions

I am not yet satified by the design of the website, but I am limited by my skills in graphic design.

If you have to build a website for a very small business too, you should use a Content Management System (CMS) (drupal for example). It will allow you to reuse themes and plugins, and to customize the website as your client want very rapidly.

The next step for me would probably be to migrate this website to a CMS, and to convince the owners that they should pay for a real host and domain name.

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