Friday, January 25, 2008

Peer to peer distributed

Facebook, by bits and pieces, slowly becomes evil, finding creative ways of pushing the boundaries to sell users' privacy to generate revenue. It's partly caused by greed (of course, the venture capitalists want to make money!), but ultimately, someone has to pay the internet bill.

If there could only be a way such that we all collectively pay the internet bill, for example, as a distributed peer-to-peer application that has low (or zero) bandwidth or other requirements for the central server. Are distributed hash tables the answer?

I can imagine some sort of "status" and pride people could get in being big contributors to the hosting, which might provide incentive for people not to free ride.

Then, the incentive of greed is diminished, and the platform may be more open. The browser/viewer application may be open source, undesirable features may be removed, privacy may be audited, and the need to trust the central server and its maintainers is diminished.

Facebook itself I feel will end poorly, unless they radically change to a new model like described above. Ultimately they will probably fail to generate enough revenue, but they will have collected a giant database of every users every action (every click!) on the site. They know every photo you every looked at and when. And, if you untag a photo, did they really destroy all records of it being tagged?

Perhaps they will have one or more security breaches, possibly subpoenas, exposing this database. Or if not, they might sell this database to the highest bidder as their exit strategy.

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