Open Letter to Diaspora Team

Open letter Diaspora Team !

www.joindiaspora.com claims that they are

the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network


Firstly your intention to make diaspora need to be appreciated !

There is also a risk of screwing of things if diaspora is not designed/implemented properly.

I have been basking on similar ideas for the past couple of years
I have few points for you in case you come across this blog .

1) If each one is going to have a webserver ( seed ) of their own , how are you going to address the trivial naming problem ?
EX : Each person would have www.firstname-lastname.ppp ( where ppp is some new TLD i.e Top Level Domain ? )
Wouldn't the DNS's servers be swamped and wouldn't IPV6 be run out of address space considering the zillions of people being added to the internet in too short time ?

Hmm this would be dumb , so would you be hosting all seeds in hosted webserver like virtual webservers on same webserver and give URLs to users like
www.joindiaspora.com/username ?

2) How is each seed going to interact with other seeds ( XMPP ? ) for all the social online activities like micro blogging , social networking etc ?

3) How is the information federation going to take place among the seeds ?

4) Can a user take their entire data with them and go to some other hosting service ?

Few pointers/ suggestions .

1) Make diaspora a pluggable web software , where in people can write plugins for all good reasons like interoperability and organic growth
2) Diaspora should be designed more like a mozilla weave , where user data would be constantly backed upto to the seed

Smart Calls Log to help decide Mobile Tariff Plan

Just had a brainwave on a new mobile app.
We are in exciting times when it comes to choice of mobile operator an end user has at least in India. With Players like TATA DOCOMO , UNINOR , MTS which are coming up with plans like
like 1paise per sec , 29 / per min , 1 rupee per call etc and many other such plans , people are really confused which one to chose which fits their needs.

wat i want is , exhaustive calls summary , like how many calls on avg i make , how much time i talk , how many long distance ,how many local calls etc an exhaustive call log which is already there in my mobile , we just need an app to display all those ,which wud help me in deciding my plan


Finally got this promising app , but still more can be added
Download Phonalyzr

Mozilla Drumbeat

Last evening was fantastic experience sharing views about open web at mozilla drumbeat organised at TERI bangalore
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/CIS-Bangalore

Here are my slides

User Centric Web

View more presentations from sashankdvk.

Few other interesting things discussed were
Open platforms for Environment , Health , Food & Hygenie
and some one was suggesting a video/audio album for spreading awareness on Open and Free Culture

Over all it was good experience

User Centric Web

From many days by now i have been thinking of this

Is the web really came out of age? Currently the web is more of Server centric or rather Service Provider centric or Website centric. Although it has been more than three decades since the web is into existence still the paradigm is to “browse” the web.

By saying Website centric Web or Service Provider Centric Web , I mean the following. Consider few scenarios

1. A User wants write a blog post , all he needs to do is to write it up that’s it , but with given current state of the web , user needs to choose one among the hundreds of blog service providers (blogger, wordpress, etc ), create an account , then write a blog post and get locked up with the service provider. Same is the case with social networking, photo sharing, video sharing, entertainment or any such thing which a normal user does on web.

2. A User wants to socialize with friends, he chooses one among the hundreds of social networking sites ( orkut , facebook, etc ) , creates an account , then finds his friends and starts communicating with them , the more the popular site , the more the probability of finding his friends. For sake of finding friends and socializing, he gets locked up with particular website which in turn makes use of his personal details and shows all those irrelevant ads on his page.

2. A User is looking for something on web, he chooses a search (service provider) to search the zillions of the websites among which most of them are irrelevant to his context (although search engines are constantly innovating to make this search better and faster) and hop from one site to another site (aka browse) the results given by search service.

In any of the above cases, it’s clear that the current web is server centric web and the paradigm has been to *browse* the websites.

Now lets see, how the web experience would have been better if its user centric web. Consider the same above scenarios .

1. User just needs to write a blog post and one or more ( user chosen and pre configured ) content savvy blogger service providers can show up this blog on the web.

2. User just need to socialize with his friends through mail, chat . He should not get his contacts locked with particular service provider. He should have the control of contacts ( locally ) and chose just the service ( mail service provider or chat service provider ).

3. User just need to shout out what he is looking for and he need to be provided with the service he is looking for . He should not be going to a search engine to search for it and get bogged down by innumerable other stuff which is not relevant to what he is looking for.

4. User should no longer browse the web , he need to command the web.

What are the benefits of taking control of the web ?

1. Imagine User is looking for a service on web, may be looking for packers and movers to shift his house, user just need to shout on the web (note : its not same as posting on a particular website , new web infrastructure for this need to be developed ) and in the result set is list of packers and movers and surprisingly a friend in his contacts has a good comment about one in the result set , there is high probability we will choose that service . With current website centric web, the movers and packers website should have social networking capability for bringing both the friends comments and services onto same website and same is not feasible for every single service.

2. More to follow.

The initial roots for such web experience can be found on flock browser , but its too naïve. There is lots of things to be done.

cellphone camera as web cam !

I wish to use my cellphone's ( Nokia 6020 ) camera as web cam with my laptop ( Sony Vaio) i run Fedora Core 10 , any pointers on how to do it ?

What the last billion wants from FOSS world ..

Well most of the kids still in developing nations dont get to learn computers , Even the Very few of them who get to use are , Ever wondered what PCs ? P2s , P3s with 10GB or 20 GB and 256 Ram etc , yes the ones which we might have used few years back and dumped it , most of them are bought in second hand or through donations etc. I do agree recycling is good , But what can they run on it ?

Wait iam not saying these machines are totally worthless ! They are still decent machines to use , decent enough for beginners and starters and kids , but is the latest software compatible with them ? with more and more features tailored into the products they have become bulk in its size and resource hungry , they cant be run on older pcs which most of our kids use , who cant afford for latest pcs too .

For ex : I cant install latest release of FEDORA or SUSE on a low end pc and teach kids to use Latest GIMP which is feature rich on P3 with 256 MB ram .

Guess gone are those days where FOSS world used to say give us any junk piece of hardware and we can run linux on it , yes you can run on it but may be u can just run linux not applications .

Apart from the localization efforts which most of LUGs in india are working on , We need to work on light weight , less resource hungry , feature rich software.

Can we Re-Engineer the existing greatest softwares like Firefox , Gimp etc to be less resource savvy ?

Guess most of this would be true for many developing and under development nations they cannot afford for latest machines each time the new release happens .

I want it more and right now !

Its so frustrating to pay higher amounts for whole month for higher bandwidths where as only quite a few times i require such high bandwidth to watch a movie or a video , at the same time its frustrating to wait for the video or movie to buffer and then watch it if i have plan with lower bandwidths. Have been wondering these days , why none of the providers have "on demand bandwidth" option ! Where in i subscribe to plan with lower bandwidth which is at lower price and request for more bandwidth when ever required and am ready to pay for it !