[Freedombox-discuss] Bootstrapping a userbase (or: killer app)

[James Vasile]

<#part sign=pgpmime>
On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:26:28 -0800, "Matt G." <mattismyname at gmail.com> 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