One of the internet’s greatest features is its open, free for all, decentralised nature. It has been built on accessible, well understood protocols that makes it easy for anyone to get connected and start serving and consuming the various services and resources available on the net. For example, if you’re feeling lucky (excluding Wikipedia), £2.49 per month gets you 1Gb, of storage, 100 IMAP mailboxes, a domain name, and your choice of Linux or Windows, which is plenty to get you a website up and running. Fancier options are available if you wanted something more, and if you’re feeling really technical, you can serve websites from the comfort of your own home.
The technologies of the internet that have survived are those that have embraced this distributed, decentralised nature. Anyone can easily register a domain name, and it’s theirs to administer to their heart’s content. And once you have a domain name you can have your own email address and your own website or FTP site, or SSH server, the list is endless. Not only is this incredibly flexible, but it’s fun to setup a server and then access it from the other side of the globe.
But many new and exciting developments on the internet today seek to reverse this trend. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and the like seek to centralise people’s activities. While this provides the public with some ingenious services and makes some people very, very rich, it can lock people in and provide a barrier to competitors getting in and inventing something of equal or greater worth in the long term. Have you tried moving your blogs from blogger to somewhere else? Have you tried moving your friends from Facebook to Google+? Have you ever been unable to post a tweet because a few million people wanted to do so at exactly the same time and the central servers got overloaded?
The social scene on the internet is far too centralised and it’s time to shake it up. Therefore, I introduce to you, PeerGroup, a de-centralised personal organisation and messaging client. PeerGroup’s aim is to use the existing, de-centralised accessible standards to create something like an email client with a focus on the social platforms that exist in today’s world.
Powering PeerGroup is a dream of mine, which is to store both email messages and other interesting objects like contacts, calendar events, tasks, etc. on an IMAP server (aka the cloud). IMAP is an old, but well understood protocol that supports synchronisation and push notifications, 2 of the staple concepts of modern social platforms. The Mail Message Format is plenty flexible enough to deal with structured data, and there’s already standard text-based formats for the staple objects of contacts, calendar events and tasks that can be used server side to do the storing.
The front end of PeerGroup, be it a website, desktop program or mobile app, will have a strong focus on contacts and social platforms. In fact my roadmap is for version 1 to support just contacts and RSS feeds. The first screen the user sees will look something like the Facebook news page, picking some snippets from the Facebook, twitter and blog feeds of your contacts and the other RSS feeds that you subscribe to.
And what is the result of this system? Choice. You no longer need to have an account on a centralised system, you can publish your own data to your own website, and your friends list will be in your own, personal secure mailbox, hosted by the provider of your choice – even yourself!
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