[foaf-protocols] FOAF + DropBox

[Melvin Carvalho]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 1:59 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I've been playing around recently with dropbox:  Here's a referral
> code in case you'd like to try it (you'll get slighly more storage
> 2.25gb vs 2gb)
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTMxNDIzNTQ5
>
> Now what's interesting is that I think FOAF + DropBox could be
> combined to form a distributed social network, in roughly 2 steps.
>
> 1. Set up a shared folder to include everyone in your FOAF
> 2. Periodically update your 'activity stream'
>
> Now your activity stream can be in almost any format.  Flat files,
> pictures, music, or an (X)HTML/RDFa page of what you've been up to.
>
> People in your FOAF group will now get updates straight to their
> desktop (windows mac linux or mobile) when you do something new, or
> add a new file and only people in your group will see your updates.
>
> Similarly you will get updates from your friends.  They could automate
> this process by getting a feed (eg RSS) from the networks they are a
> member of (you can do this easily enough with FOAF too).
>
> If the updates are RDFa slices timestamped you could run a parser to
> give you all of the updates in time order.  Furthermore, you could
> store and filter the triples to your own choosing.
>
> Just some food for thought, I think it would work ...


Been thinking more about this.  For anyone that hasnt tried this yet, it's
worth appreciating the tech of Dropbox, or another distributed sync system
such as Ubuntu One (tho dropbox is probably the most seamless and is also
cross platform).

I'd encourage you to ask yourself the following questions:

- What if:  your dropbox was powered by FOAF?

- What if:  your dropbox had intelligent visibility permissions based of
foaf:Group?

- What if:  your dropbox could take delivery of the PHYSICAL items as well
the digital?

- What if:  your dropbox had a wishlist?

- What if:  your dropbox was wired in to the linked open data consciousness?

It may possible to reach some quite interesting technical and philosophical
conclusions!

>
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