[Owncloud] Questions and ideas

[Clément 'clemux' Schreiner]

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

About that, I think the PSYC project would be interesting to look into. To 
quote http://about.psyc.eu/ :
"PSYC is a protocol for a messaging infrastructure for text-based 
conferencing, but also enabling transparent binary data. It has learned from 
protocols such as IRC and XMPP and found an approach that should indeed scale 
globally, by generalizing the multicast concept beyond chatrooms to presence 
awareness, news- and friendcasting. It leers at decentralized privacy-driven 
social networking (using trust metrics), telephony and audio/video 
conferencing. Chatrooms are programmable, which enables for applications such 
as event notification. 

PSYC is not in competition with IRC and Jabber. As psyced implements both, 
they are a very strong presence in the PSYC experience. PSYC has spent more 
time on the design of a robust scaling interserver protocol, whereas the other 
two protocols treat it like a necessary evil. We think all three protocols 
make a great team and unity if IRC and Jabber stay strong on the client side 
while PSYC is in charge of interserver traffic. Yet, we love to see powerful 
native PSYC clients, too... "

(See also http://about.psyc.eu/Introduction)

What is really great with PSYC, is that they kept interoperability in mind: 
the PSYC server psyced also acts as a XMPP server and as an IRC server, 
implementing both client and interserver protocols.

And of course, it is not limited to text-based conferencing: experimental 
features like microblogging (with interfaces to twitter and other systems), 
real-time "push" notifications, friends profiles surfing (facebook-style), among 
others, are already working (well, more like proof-of-concept).

http://about.psyc.eu/Social_network
http://about.psyc.eu/Microblogging
http://about.psyc.eu/Strength

They have done a great work of documenting a lot of different protocols, 
websites, etc. with their flaws and advantages, on the wiki.

That said, I don't know if the course of action to take would be collaboration 
between the two projects, integration, or just drawing inspiration from their 
work... :)