DON'T GO OUTSIDE

rafer:

Doc Searls Weblog · What if Flickr fails?

I have a proposal to address the Y! sunsetting panic and similarly valid fears. Part of the inspiration comes from an email thread I had with @davewiner last month. I was looking at building what amounted to Feedburner 2011. Dave pushed on me to avoid creating another data chokepoint that could be abused or simply fail. And he’s right.

I’m unlikely to pursue the idea for completely unrelated reasons, but I think I may have a way to bridge tension between the need to aggregate shared media and the need to avoid single points of leverage/failure. Most users just want the social software vendor to do the hosting, but large and or very technical users may want to self host. And, when a service gets put on some MSN alum’s sunsetting list, there needs to be a slick way to duck and cover. 

I think the solution is to build a social file system (SFS) as an instance on Ubuntu Cloud. In this specific circumstance, I should be able to take my flickr photos, download them to the SFS, and control what graphs have access to theme using OAuth. My media can live on an SFS-compatible host within the graph vendor, on Amazon EC2 instances I rent myself, or on other servers I self-host running Ubuntu. This raises other problems including graph performance and how I easily get a copy of the unique data that a specific graph generates. And, it doesn’t address the contractual question of graph ownership. 

Keeping the SFS to low level data and metadata storage and access, leaving application logic, graph navigation, et al, to other vendors would keep everyone’s motivations and vulnerabilities where they belong.

Sounds like you are at least a little bit talking about Aproxymator. (a Neoteny Labs project from last year inspired by similar thoughts)

Posted 1 year ago — 11 notes