michael han

A decentralized, connective personal-social website

by Michael Han, 3 years ago
Wed, May 12, 2010 4:41 PM | social networking | 0 comments

It's actually being developed here. What you see here is it.

As it became increasingly clear to me that your own privacy of personal information isn't something you can effectively protect while using either cloud or popular social platforms, I have decided to experiment with an alternative approach. Obviously, this isn't something I can do on my own, but as one of the perceived principles for online-based collaborative efforts I felt that there has to be some kernel of operational platform for this "personal/social" experiment to be viable, thus the reason for this website that seems deliberately personal.

You could argue that you could already design such a system using one of popular CMS available today, but I personally think they are little too bloated to be useful for this purpose.

Here is a draft version of the vision for the new breed of, for the lack of better term, personal/social website:

1. Securing of personal data
   

   This was easy to do when the default state of computers was in offline world, but with the proliferation of global connectivity this becomes a bit of hard work. The primary goal of building this website, which no doubt would make some think of reinventing the wheel, is to allow maximum customization of access and maximum security, which may be easier said than done.

2. Social connectivity
   

   One of the best reasons for the success of modern social platforms is the connectivity. It allows people to easily connect and interact with others.

   OAuth, OpenID and some Twitteresque services could be utilized for cross-site authentication and sharing of information to allow a network of personal/social website to be formed at will.

3. Ease of data sharing
   

   People simply love sharing resource links, videos, photos, and their writings. Again the new personal/social website could facilitate this with ease, although the need for a storage capacity would dictate an adopter to actually spend a little bit of money for a CDN of sorts.

   Without encumbering already rich sets of open protocols, I opine that there is a need to develop a targeted protocol just for sharing such personal data across the net.

4. Ease of information management
   

   It should be easy to manage blogs, videos, photos, links, and so on.

So far, I have managed to create a new type of blogging system that hinges on something I'm calling a "wordset." It's a type of semantic, referential container, maybe something like a keyword, for everything you store on the site.

Every blog you write is associated with a wordset, which in turn is part of a bigger schema that is akin to a taxonomical system of words. And each time you update something, the wordset is pushed to the top of your navigation menu. And of course, on the top of this, you still have the ubiquitous tag words you can include. More on this later...