[Owncloud] Questions and ideas

[Jos Poortvliet]

2010/3/25 Clément 'clemux' Schreiner <clemux+kde at clemux.info>:
> 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...

Certainly part of the goals of ownCloud. Of course currently we're
still a while from archieving those ;-)

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

The social desktop initiative is not directly part of ownCloud -
basically it's a complementary project. To "take back the web", the
KDE community has a few initiatives.

* ownCloud (owncloud.org) is the one which is concerned with syncing
and sharing your data; including music, bookmarks and probably
application settings.
* The social desktop  (socialdesktop.org) is about social networking;
* Project Silk (http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Silk) is about
freeing the web from the browser (all these services available in
off-line apps);
* for realtime collaboration we don't have a specific, big project
yet, but Telepathy & ownCloud might work together to accomplish this.
Of course several people are working on similar stuff - there just
isn't a big, overarching vision there yet.

> 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.
>
>
> This would of course extend to email server, IM server, etc.

Sounds wicked, and it does fit with OwnCloud yes.

>
>
> If any of that could be part of ownCloud, I'd be happy to develop and start
> implementing these ideas :)

please go ahead :D

>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Clément Schreiner

grtz
Jos