[Freedombox-discuss] blogging in the FB (was Re: Roadmap Brainstorming)

[Les Orchard]

On 3/18/11 1:34 PM, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Les Orchard<l.m.orchard at pobox.com>  wrote:
>>> FreedomBox is not about avoiding cloud computing, or about tolerating it
>>> in public sphere(s).  FreedomBox is about _using_ cloud computing.
>> +1
>>
>> This may or may not entirely agree with what you mean, but: I'd like my
>> FreedomBox to be my command center for the cloud.
> Funny, that's actually exactly how I expect I would use one too.  I
> just kind of figured it would be more of an "advanced user" scenario,
> for someone who already knows how to take care of their data and is
> comfortable integrating may different things together.

Well, that's the thing: What if this *wasn't* an advanced user feature, 
and actually had some UI that helped guide less-savvy users along? I 
think this stuff can be made easier as a goal of the FreedomBox. My 
thinking is that ease of use is the slippery slope that's gotten so many 
people sucked into silos.

> I mean, expecting every FB user to sign up for Amazon, sign up for
> Facebook, sign up for Twitter, and then know how to use his FB to feed
> data into all these different cloud services is a bit advanced.  It
> also feels a tiny bit off-topic.

What if a FreedomBox had something like Apple's iWeb—only, imagine it 
guided you through signing up to one of many web hosts rather than 
herding you into MobileMe?

Also, many people already have Twitter & Facebook accounts and use 
desktop/mobile apps. What if a FreedomBox came with a micro-blogging app 
that connects to those services, but *also* keeps local backups and 
supports many alternate channels? You could even use it from the browser 
on your mobile phone, given some way to connect to a web server back home

If you got fed up with Twitter / Facebook, just disconnect. You'd still 
have all your content and your contacts, in some form. You could keep 
using your FreedomBox client to broadcast through other channels. Say, 
identi.ca or status.net sites. Or, even, a static HTML site with Atom / 
RSS feeds made semi-real-time by way of PubSubHubub and rssCloud.

> But maybe that's OK.  Build something us geeks like, then iteratively
> polish it until it's good enough for Joe Random could be a perfectly
> valid strategy.

+1 - that's the way to think about it, IMO. Consider about the eventual 
goal, fill in the underlying capabilities and iterate on the UI.

-- 
l.m.orchard at pobox.com
http://decafbad.com
{web,mad,computer} scientist