[p2p-research] faroo p2p search + facebook quitters

Wed Jun 30 17:02:26 CEST 2010

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 9:02 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I agree with your perspective Sepp,
>
> Facebook has become a daily fixture for me now (2 x 20 minutes), to see what my friends are doing, give som extra weight to certain of our discoveries et c...
>
> I can't measure or prove whether link distribution works there or not, but is a good dashboard,
>
> twitter is for me useless as an info tool, but wonderful as a distribution tool, we are reaching nearly 7,000 retweets ...
>
> Michel
>

Twitter works better as a real-time experience: seeing information as
it is posted and joining conversation (which of course everyone does
not have time for). We tend to use tools (growl, and twitter clients)
to let these updates stream to in the background while we do other
tasks. Perhaps microblogging is in part derived from experiences in
multitasking (using channels of short burst communication to carry on
convesation while carrying out other work, being employed, etc).

It is also worth noting that many now use twitter and facebook from
mobile devices.

> On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Sepp Hasslberger <sepp at lastrega.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thank you Michel,
>> for FAROO, I did a little post by way of introducing it and scheduled that tentatively for 3 July on the p2p foundation blog.
>> As for the article on facebook quitters, I enjoyed Ryan and Sam's comments. My view on facebook (I'm using it fairly actively for the time being) is that it's useful because
>> - threshold for participating is low
>> - number of participants makes fb an obvious choice (who wants to be where your friends aren't?)
>> - they are opening a new field and letting us experiment with a tool that facilitates conversation among many parties.
>> I will use facebook as long as it's useful but the moment I see a p2p alternative that makes sense, I'll be thinking hard about changing over.
>> Of course such an alternative has to eliminate the mistakes facebook is making, especially on privacy. Other formidable obstacles to overcome are to find the right mix of services to catch the imagination of a majority of users, and the fact that it will have to grow from essentially nothing to having a useful number of participants. Not easy.
>> Sepp
>>
>>
>> On 13/giu/10, at 10:03, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>>
>> Hi sepp, I wonder if you could look into this:
>>
>> (I would also appreciate your comments on danah boyd's critique of facebook quitters ... see http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/23/quitting-facebook-is-pointless-challenging-them-to-do-better-is-not.html )
>>
>> Michel
>>
>>
>> Bernard Lunn
>> May 27th, 2010 at 9:18 am
>>
>> Disclosure: I represent FAROO and we are using p2p to solve both privacy & search scalability
>>
>> This is the big conflict: we need community powered personalization to filter information but we also need privacy. It is possible that p2p, where no data is stored/controlled centrally and is encrypted on the wire, is the only way to do this.
>>
>> FAROO has been working on this for many years and have now proved that it is possible: our p2p search network has 1.7 million peers with search latency below 1 second.
>>
>> You mentioned two questions around p2p. These are things we have been thinking about for a long time.
>>
>> “I am all in favor of people building what they believe to be alternatives to Facebook. I even invested in Diaspora because I’m curious what will come of that system. But I don’t believe that Diaspora is a Facebook killer. I do believe that there is a potential for Diaspora to do something interesting that will play a different role in the ecosystem and I look forward to seeing what they develop. I’m also curious about the future of peer-to-peer systems in light of the move towards the cloud, but I’m not convinced that decentralization is a panacea to all of our contemporary woes. Realistically, I don’t think that most users around the globe will find a peer-to-peer solution worth the hassle. The cost/benefit analysis isn’t in their favor. ”
>>
>> The download hurdle is a common reservation. It has not proved a hurdle when the payoff is big enough – think Skype and Spotify. And more recently the iPhone and Android app stores have totally changed the mindset around downloading software. The key issue I think is what you mention – “hassle”. It is a hassle free experience on iPhone but people have found the experience less than hassle-free on the PC. That is why Diaspora may find the technical challenges harder than they think. Making p2p totally scalable, reliable and hassle free is not simple.
>>
>> “I’m also patently afraid that a system like Diaspora will be quickly leveraged for child pornography and other more problematic uses that tend to emerge when there isn’t a centralized control system.”
>>
>> In Diaspora each user places their profile on their own server, so they will held responsible anyway. If people would like to store illegal things on a server they can do it all the time, they don’t need Diaspora for this. FAROO only indexes information that is already publicly available. If something is bad, you can remove the original page, than it will disappear from the p2p system, automatically.
>>
>> Recently Google offered https encrypted search for more privacy:
>>
>> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html
>>
>> While Google’s https search eliminates wiretapping by intermediate parties, but they still collect log files.
>>
>> HTTPS does not protect against a leak of those log files by technical problems, human error, later changes of terms of services, criminal data theft, legal challenges, or silent cooperation with interested authorities.
>>
>> Google still collects personal data, but offers privacy by policy (which can be changed or challenged). The same is true of Facebook clearly!
>>
>> FAROO in turn does not collect personal data at all, and offers privacy by architectural design (attention data for ranking are anonymized /search queries stay encrypted all the time, because the index is encrypted itself / there is no central data repository which could be wiretapped).
>>
>>
>> Bernard Lunn
>> May 27th, 2010 at 9:18 am
>>
>> Disclosure: I represent FAROO and we are using p2p to solve both privacy & search scalability
>>
>> This is the big conflict: we need community powered personalization to filter information but we also need privacy. It is possible that p2p, where no data is stored/controlled centrally and is encrypted on the wire, is the only way to do this.
>>
>> FAROO has been working on this for many years and have now proved that it is possible: our p2p search network has 1.7 million peers with search latency below 1 second.
>>
>> You mentioned two questions around p2p. These are things we have been thinking about for a long time.
>>
>> “I am all in favor of people building what they believe to be alternatives to Facebook. I even invested in Diaspora because I’m curious what will come of that system. But I don’t believe that Diaspora is a Facebook killer. I do believe that there is a potential for Diaspora to do something interesting that will play a different role in the ecosystem and I look forward to seeing what they develop. I’m also curious about the future of peer-to-peer systems in light of the move towards the cloud, but I’m not convinced that decentralization is a panacea to all of our contemporary woes. Realistically, I don’t think that most users around the globe will find a peer-to-peer solution worth the hassle. The cost/benefit analysis isn’t in their favor. ”
>>
>> The download hurdle is a common reservation. It has not proved a hurdle when the payoff is big enough – think Skype and Spotify. And more recently the iPhone and Android app stores have totally changed the mindset around downloading software. The key issue I think is what you mention – “hassle”. It is a hassle free experience on iPhone but people have found the experience less than hassle-free on the PC. That is why Diaspora may find the technical challenges harder than they think. Making p2p totally scalable, reliable and hassle free is not simple.
>>
>> “I’m also patently afraid that a system like Diaspora will be quickly leveraged for child pornography and other more problematic uses that tend to emerge when there isn’t a centralized control system.”
>>
>> In Diaspora each user places their profile on their own server, so they will held responsible anyway. If people would like to store illegal things on a server they can do it all the time, they don’t need Diaspora for this. FAROO only indexes information that is already publicly available. If something is bad, you can remove the original page, than it will disappear from the p2p system, automatically.
>>
>> Recently Google offered https encrypted search for more privacy:
>>
>> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html
>>
>> While Google’s https search eliminates wiretapping by intermediate parties, but they still collect log files.
>>
>> HTTPS does not protect against a leak of those log files by technical problems, human error, later changes of terms of services, criminal data theft, legal challenges, or silent cooperation with interested authorities.
>>
>> Google still collects personal data, but offers privacy by policy (which can be changed or challenged). The same is true of Facebook clearly!
>>
>> FAROO in turn does not collect personal data at all, and offers privacy by architectural design (attention data for ranking are anonymized /search queries stay encrypted all the time, because the index is encrypted itself / there is no central data repository which could be wiretapped).
>>
>> --
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>
>> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
>
>
>

--
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