Hi, After watching a few of the ideas passing by on this mailing list I though I'd introduce myself.
I'm Pepijn de Vos, a web developer with a strong interest in social media. I program mostly PHP, Python and Clojure. I'm the author of a p2p network plugin for Wordpress, which is at the moment not maintained. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/p2p-social-networker/ I'm not an network specialist, but my experience with port forwarding and server installations tell me that someone has to get really, really smart to get real p2p working. It's just to complicated for the average person to run his own server. And then we have not yet talked about the issues of security, changing IP addresses and locations and offline users. The solution from Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson sound very interesting though. I personally think it is more feasible to go for an XMPP style federated approach or maybe more like Git and Mercurial. That means we still need servers, but it's decentralized; Every server can talk to every other sever, and so can their clients. Maybe this could even be an extension to XMPP? I have a test on my computer which user Mercurial to pull and merge user profiles, in which case a website like bitbucket could be turned into a social network. Another thing that can't be said enough: I think a common protocol is very valuable in this case. I want to share one more idea of mine, which I call reverse oauth(I know, bad name). Normally you tell Twitter to grant access to a certain application. With reverse oauth, every user takes the place of an app and a server at the same time. This means that every user has its own key and secret and can ask permission to your account. After you grant them access, they get an access token to you account. You, like any other user, maintain a list of access tokens to access the accounts of your friends. I'm not an encryption expert either, but I imagine you can do some nice encryption and validation with this token as well. Groeten, Pepijn de Vos -- Sent from my iPod Shuffle http://pepijndevos.nl
