[Freedombox-discuss] Freedombox-discuss Digest, Vol 19, Issue 16

tornow at riseup.net tornow at riseup.net
Fri Feb 17 19:03:38 UTC 2012


> On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:56:31 +0000
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:26:28 -0800
> From: "Matt G." <mattismyname at gmail.com>
> To: freedombox-discuss at lists.alioth.debian.org
> Subject: [Freedombox-discuss] Bootstrapping a userbase (or: killer
> 	app)
> Message-ID:
> 	<CALptftNyjG0LBP_xf1t9JmrM6THJyKakdPSq4tECfLq=mQEY=Q at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
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To a person like me, just a simple user, two or three things are of main
interest:

a) a way to get rid of the big email-providers without going through
the process of configuring the mail-server myself.

b) a way to easily share data with the people i know (sometimes even
tiny code-snippets which i just want to show without the need to use
gist, pastebinit, or other services of that kind).
Right now i use apache2 and a folder /var/www/share for that. It works,
but is not exactly comfortable.

c) having got your own central place where you have got some important
data you can use from your PC, your laptop, your smartphone and "on the
road" (internet-cafes, at work, etc), without having to keep a stick in
sync is perhaps  interesting for a lot of people too. 

Besides that:
As far i can tell a blog-application (like wordpress) is quite
interesting too, as you can use it for all kind of projects 
(be it to store photos, to write a real blog, to have a simply way to
have your own web-site, to store notes and docus/how-to's, and what
not).

I like scuttle a lot, as it is a more comfortable way to store my
bookmarks, but am not sure if a bigger user-base might be interested
(i also couldn't find a way to change the interface from German to
English, which does not mean there is none). 

-
All of the above might be obvious already, but those are the main
things which i would need as a freedombox. To me my own apache-server
with wordpress and scuttle is already a huge step forwards. Gitolite
and such on top of it is a plus.  

greetings
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