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The Windows-Mac rivalry of the 90s and 2000s requires no further explanation. One thing we’ve all learned from that story is that hardware was the key component that everyone but Steve Jobs had missed.
It may not be very obvious, but today the same play is being staged. Unlike the former, when the hardware was the driver of excellence in UX (user-experience), this time it will be the driver of elevated privacy.
“A surveillance society can be erected in just ten years, but takes centuries to roll back”
Rick Falkvinge, Pirate Party
This quote is from years ago, but finally, thanks to Cambridge Analytica scandal, people are getting increasingly aware of their privacy and the implications of the lack thereof.
Consequently, we’ve all started to talk about a paid version of Facebook, or the term “distributed” where the centralized services like Facebook would sit on and serve from a bunch of computers that we all consume in our daily or professional lives.
While it is still arguable whether they are possible/practical, I think the principles are well-put, but the methods can be different. Let me elaborate on that;
For example, for distributed, we don’t need a ledger to accomplish this task. After all, email is distributed too. All we need is a set of protocols similar to SMTP and IMAP which empower the email services we all use today. Emails run distributed; corporate emails and individual accounts speak to each other despite being on different grids and networks.
The good news is, we already have these protocols for social networking. Take microformats for social network interoperability, or oAuth as a basis of Facebook Connect. Heck, even IRC does actually constitute the basis of Slack. These protocols are underrated, underdogs that have been forgotten due to the lack of a commercial entity backing them.
Why do we prefer Gmail over running our own email servers? It’s because of it’s easier, and more practical.
Had we had a mini server sitting in our house providing Gmail functionality under our domain and without touching any remote servers, we would be using it instead, given its privacy advantages. The same can be applied to Slack (IRC), Dropbox (FTP) and social networking (microformats). All these internet behemoths pioneered in beautiful user interfaces, and ease-of-use, but now it’s time to make them private by design, using open protocols, just like how the internet was originally designed.
Which brings me to my second point; “paid”. Paid Facebook doesn’t have to be a replica of today’s Facebook except for advertising. It can be bundled in the hardware. Today we’ve come to an inflection point when people can actually spare a few tens to hundreds to make this dream possible in a commercially viable way. Just like they did pay an extra for the quality associated with Mac “computers.”
I don’t talk about an extra computer for every house, but I’m talking about transforming a device we all already have in a dark corner of our homes. I’m talking about routers… Always-on, always-connected.
Thanks to $5 Raspberry Pi, even the tiny computers are not that tiny anymore and can act as a server. To illustrate this, take a look at myphotolinks an open source hobby project by Brian Hendrickson. It is a very early proof, but a good start.
A new hardware startup can definitely turn these routers into something smarter and more beautiful, perhaps with email and distributed social networking services we’ve all been craving. At the very least, it would give us an opportunity to reconsider all these telco-subsidized cheap, limited and locked routers.
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