It’s All About Sharing and Control

Thursday September 06th 2007, 2:43 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:AllPeers, Social Networks, Social Software
Posted By: Cedric

Following my post yesterday on my top 15 features for an Open Social Network, Al Billings writes “All of this is tied up in the problem of identity, communication or messaging between people, and the exchange of data.“. He is absolutely right but I would go one step further and say that in fact it is only about Sharing (and control).

According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, “to share” means to use, to experience, to occupy, or to enjoy with others. It also means to have in common or to tell (as thoughts, feelings, or experiences) to others.

This definition to me summarizes perfectly the various activities one perform on any SN. I will share my identity (or some part of it), I will share my tastes, I will share some communication and finally I will share some data (photos, videos, etc…). On a Social Network, we are all peers (AllPeers…) engaging in some sharing business.

Most SN are very good at letting you create a sexy profile (a few fields in a database attached to some pictures) but they tend to fail miserably when addressing the sharing functions. On MySpace for example I can have a private profile or a public profile. Which means that as soon as I accept you in my private profile, everything I will share on it will be available to you. Do you really want that? I don’t. This is the same for Facebook just to name these 2. Likewise, I can create some photo albums and share a few pictures but try to share the 400MB video you did during your last vacations in Ibiza. Even if the service allows you to post a 400MB video, do you really want to sit and look at the file being uploaded to a server (bearing in mind that as part of that process you are giving the corporation managing the site full rights on your file)? I don’t.

Imagine a phone company saying to you: You can make as many phone calls as you want. As long as they are not more than 5 minutes long. Oh and by the way, your conversation can be heard by anybody.

So what’s my point here? Simple really. This is the reason why at AllPeers we have been focusing on solving the sharing problem by allowing users to share exactly what they want with exactly who they want (starting with files but this can and will easily be extended to information). By letting the user organize his contacts into specific groups and by giving him the highest level of granularity when it comes to deciding who can see what, we are putting the user back in control of his own destiny. By removing any limit to what people can share we are saying: explore your creativity, produce content, whatever it is, we’ll make sure we can transport it from your computer to your friends computer. By encrypting the communication between our users we are telling them: your communication with your friends is exactly that: yours.

There is still a long way to go before walled-gardens will collapse but we believe it to be ineluctable and we intend to make a modest contribution to that trend.


3 Comments »

  1. Cedric, this is excellent post. Now I can see advantages of AP over other NPs. This should be shout aloud.

    Comment by funTomas — 9/7/2007 @ 12:48 pm

  2. Yes I second that.

    Comment by Adam — 9/7/2007 @ 7:05 pm

  3. Can I please have AllPeers nightlies that work in Firefox trunk builds? Pretty please? :-)

    Comment by Al Billings — 9/7/2007 @ 8:38 pm

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