<#part sign=pgpmime> On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:26:28 -0800, "Matt G." <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Many financial institutions do not provide APIs. Some give you manual download of xml files. Some don't even give you that. > > 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. I'd like to see this build on top of notmuch. > > 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. Fair enough. Regards, James _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
