[Owncloud] Questions and ideas

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 25.03.2010, at 00:51, Clément 'clemux' Schreiner wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I just stumbled upon the ownCloud projet, and it seems to bring solutions to a 
> lot of problems that have been bothering me these past months. Maybe I 
> overestimate the project, so I think I'll begin by exposing my expectations, 
> so that you can correct me if I'm wrong :).
> 
> * bookmarks, RSS, music, and other personal data syncing 
> Ever since I use a laptop in addition to my desktop computer, I've been 
> struggling to sync data between these computers, and I don't even own a 
> smartphone...
> 

That exactly the idea. We are starting with a solution for files. But the plan is to have different
plugins for all this usecases you mentioned.

I hope that a lot of developers help with the client and the server side for this additional service plugins.



> For bookmarks, there are solutions like del.icio.us etc., but I don't want to 
> store my data on private/for profit/etc. companies's servers.
> I finally discovered Mozilla Weave (https://mozillalabs.com/weave/), which made 
> me use firefox instead of 
> arora/rekonq/konqueror.
> It works well, we can install our own server, so maybe its integration to a 
> kde browser could be a solution... But it would be even nicer if we could 
> share those bookmarks, just like del.icio.us...

Yes. I agree. This is the goal. :-)


> Then, the RSS feeds: I use akregator on my laptop only, since I don't want to 
> subscribe to each feed twice, and I did not find solutions other than sharing 
> the configuration files...
> Google Reader (or other services) would do it, but I don't like web 
> applications (plus the same previous argument for del.icio.us).
> It would be nice to have a server polling RSS feeds, and then pushing them to 
> different readers (web apps, desktop akregator-like apps, etc).
> 

I personally have exactly the same problem. I agree completely.

> 
> Could those be, or are they already, projects for ownCloud?
> 

The project is only 3 weeks old so we don´t have code for your suggestions yet.
But hopefully people will work on this soon. 


> 
> * Decentralized social networking
> I'm concerned with the growing centralization of data in the hands of a few 
> private companies (Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and worst of all, Google). By 
> data, I mean email, IM, blogging, microblogging, photos, ...
> 
> Could a solution to that be part of ownCloud, or is that completely off-topic? 
> No page on the wiki or discussion of this list does mention that, but if I did 
> not misunderstand it, Frank spoke about that in his keynote 
> (http://www.socialdesktop.org/kdeandthecloud.pdf).

A decentralized social network would be the final goal. But there are still some
technical problems to make this happen.




> For example, I have in mind something like "aptitude install owncloud-
> blogging" which would automagically install and setup a blogging system 
> (Wordpress, Dotclear, whatever) and would give the user the url of the blog on 
> his own server, where he could start writing, just as easily as if he had 
> signed up to Blogger.

Yes! Exactly.




> 
> This would of course extend to email server, IM server, etc.
> 
> 
> 
> If any of that could be part of ownCloud, I'd be happy to develop and start 
> implementing these ideas :)

I think all of your ideas could be part of ownCloud. And you help if very welcome. :-)

Cheers
Frank




--
Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org