Filed under: development, sphere
I really love traveling, and in fact, I’m in the process of getting ready for a trip in a few days. Aside from packing, I do something for every place I plan to go: Google maps. Sure, I’ll be flying, but I still like to know how far away it is, what destinations are on the road getting there, and on some level, it’s humbling to zoom out and feel really small. Perhaps we can blame it on the satellite imagery. When I was little, I did the same with a road atlas and a highlighter. Now, over the years of wear and tear on that atlas it’s barely legible, but to some extent I can look back at where I’ve been.
When it comes to designing software, it’s good to be able to look back and see where we started from, and look ahead to where we are going. So in this facet, the planning and development stage of software design can be compared to a road trip. Sure, there are road blocks, there are detours, and sometimes, there are faster routes to take. At times, the destination seems so far away, almost unreachable. But, reaching landmarks makes everything worthwhile, and when you pass a few on the road or in development, the end goal becomes that much closer!
SupraSphere is the brainchild of David Thomson, and he started dreaming up a fully unified messaging and communication environment in ‘98 or ‘99. In a figurative sense, let’s put that as our starting off point. Where has the project been since then? Where are we now? And, are we there yet? :)
Programming started in 2001, right after David started collaborating with two friends of his, who both were pursuing a PHD in cryptography; Adam Klivans at MIT and Rocco Servedio other at Harvard. The first usable development version was released in 2002.
December of ‘03 was a monumental landmark, as the first installation took place into a private hedge fund. It is used as trading floor workflow and is a sort of posting board for news items. So anytime a portfolio manager wants to send in a trade into the trading floor, they use SS software to manage it. However, it should be noted that this implementation of SS is quite different than the client that is in development now.
Although it seems an eternity, two years development time could seem like driving through Iowa. SupraSphere continued to progress and evolve. However, another landmark was reached in June of 2006, when Andy Singleton and David started working together and brought the project to Assembla, of which Andy is the president. Development then became that much easier to organize and orchestrate with Assembla’s turn-key project management and development hosting.
That very same month I met a very good friend of David’s who became a mentor to me. in October of 2006, I met David for the first time on a hike up Foss Mountain in New Hampshire, and somehow we ended up talking about software and other computer related ventures. We became fast friends and soon thereafter he showed me a *very* bare bones SupraSphere running on his laptop. I was fascinated by it, and asked him if I could be a part of it somehow.
In April or May of 2007, in my inbox I received an invitation to the desktop client. I installed it, and David and I have been working on SS and Suprablog ever since.
Now, where are we headed after all those milestones and monumental landmarks? I think we are almost there, almost at our desired destination. Won’t you come along for the ride?
Filed under: open source, sphere
I have become accustomed to using Pidgin for managing my incredibly long IM list. It’s alright for the most part, although it’s lacking in a few departments. Currently file transfer in Yahoo Messenger is broken, well, (I have heard that MSN does work, but I never use it) it seems like all file transfer is broken. Audio and Video Messaging in AIM and Yahoo does not function either.
Yes I know, it seems like I have a lot to complain about, but one thing I really love about Pidgin is the capability to set one icon and one status for all running accounts. Generally I have three running at any given time, Yahoo, GTalk, and AIM, with the occasional Jabber account running. Naturally I have it set to logging all messages and statuses, as well as logging my contacts as when they were “last seen” in military time. Plus, who doesn’t love to chat it up on #ubuntu-forums? Pidgin supports IRC too.
Now, I have yet to get my hands on the web version of SS, but from what I understand, a lot of things I’ve been wanting are coming true. However, this is not about what’s going on with the web development. This is about what I’d like to see in the web version. :)
SS is cross-platform as we all know, so having a truly cross-platform, fully compatible, richly featured IM client would be awesome. But, as we also know, SS is not an IM client. Wouldn’t it be cool though to be able to use SS and its IM feature to communicate with other clients though?
How would it work? In the not so distant future, users of the web-based or the software-based client would be able to open a context specific “social sphere” dedicated to only IM. Using some sort of invite feature, one could invite others to link with them in this sphere and regardless of the protocol used (whether it be AIM, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, or what have you) users could message their contacts. However, as a user of SS, we’d be able to use it full-featured with the terse messaging, whereas the non-SS users would see every message in the standard view for their client.
What I think would be really outstanding is if there were some way to incorporate voice and/or video into SS, as a more intuitive (and furthermore a multi-platform) version of Skype, Wengo, or even iChat. Voice chat and video conferencing seems to be the new wave for social networking, although many corporations have been pioneering this venture for years now. First hand I know JCPenney uses real-time and on-demand video conferencing and training for associates as well as supervisors and managers, and I have an educated guess that other “fine retailers” do the same. It certainly is not new, but being able to bring this to people not associated with big business would be a big benefit to the whole communication scene.
Myspace has introduced it’s Myspace/Skype IM client in recent history, and although I don’t use Myspace, many of my contacts do and conveniently beg me to install it. Thankfully it doesn’t seem to function under Linux, even with Wine, because for some reason I have a general loathing for all things Myspace. However, the way I understand it, Skype communicates with the Myspace client, so some of my brave friends will Skype me. I’m really hoping Facebook would implement something like this…
There are many more ideas and hypothetical new features that I plan on discussing as a weekly feature. However, I’d love to hear your input on what you’d like to see in the web-client or the software-client. Send me an email, IM me, or more importantly, leave a comment for everyone to read!
Filed under: cloud, security, sphere
There have been numerous announcements recently from Google and Microsoft related to storing health information on their servers in their grid. There has also been some controversy around these initiatives over privacy concerns, particularly because it comes from these two companies where they have already consolidated a lot of other information and leverage with respect to the IT infrastructure of both individuals and businesses.
So, let’s leave aside a question of whether it’s those two specific organizations that manage health records over any other, and whether it’s better to have any particular large corporation instead of a government entity, non-profit, or other-worldly organization in the first place. Let’s first start with abstract theory! :)
I’m going to begin by asserting that I don’t care what a company’s privacy policy is. If any organization were so good at codifying and following a particular privacy policy, why don’t they actually code it in code instead of in legalese? That way they can get specific and avoid any of the semantic dances to skirt around responsibility for which lawyers have become so infamous. Famously, possession is 99% of the law anyway, and letting others possess your data means they own it.
But I want to go even deeper than that. First, there is generally the issue of privacy. Is there any expectation of privacy in this digital age in the first place? Why should anyone need privacy if they have nothing to hide?
Well, I don’t need any privacy, but I want it. It’s that simple. Until I behave irresponsibly, defined in as context-specific and inter-subjective way as possible, then I deserve it and should have the right to it. Otherwise, we go down the slippery slope of starting with the assumption that everyone is a criminal until the individual proves otherwise, and the problem is that people over time and in aggregate generally behave about as highly as what is collectively expected of them.
There are people who think that having the oversight of some big brother who can read/monitor our thoughts will make us better as individuals and as a society. Then there are those of us who feel that the only path to true order and security in society rests with personal responsibility, and that the best the rest of us can do with respect to an individual is hope that eventually each person finds that sense within themselves with the help of loving external reinforcement. But, make no mistake about it, the external reinforcement is no substitute for personal responsibility; that type of substitution is a prostitution.
One of the highest hopes of society is that common, ordinary people will often do extraordinarily good things, and we are increasingly entering an age where unless that is the case, no amount of tracking, incarceration, punishment, deterrence, or stick will prevent people from doing stupid things.
Now that we have all that out of the way, I want to get back to technology. We are at a time where there is unprecedented research going on, with a convergence of so many disciplines, and as a result we are hitting a point where a lot of what we see with respect to the computer industry starts to become analogous to biology and life. So, who controls the PC, you or Microsoft, Apple, or the government? Is it ok for Microsoft or any other entity (RIAA) to be able to shut off your computer without your permission or control? How about delete files from your computer? What happens when computers start to become integrated?
Well, if you’re still with me and interested in seeing where I’m going with this as far as health records, access to health information is presumably of critical importance to patients. It seems to be of great use to doctors to have access to medical history from previous visits or other doctors (although sometimes I think it would be interesting to be able to get a “blind” opinion without access to *any* records…not sure that’s even an option), and part of the promise of some of these online medical initiatives is that it can be potentially very valuable to have that information readily available for things like sharing and collaborating around x-rays, or with emerging fields such as telemedicine.
So, what sort of rights do I then have to that vault of information created about me? What if a company wants to start charging me a lot of money for continued access to it, or changes that privacy policy to something that I don’t like, or shares it with people where I don’t approve, or won’t share it with people where I insist? What happens when there is an outage and my doctor(s) can’t access my information in a timely fashion?
Then, let’s suppose that sometime down the line (not sure how long, but it seems to be happening), a company develops a mechanism to monitor an individual’s vital signs and administer drugs automatically and accordingly. Who has control over that? Will it be more like ADT or like OnStar, where they either just monitor things remotely or start to exercise certain levels of remote control, such as changing doses? Will there be a kill switch? Will there be a black box in case anything goes wrong? These issues are directly and highly related to the problem of control and access to health information, because they reflect the growing trend of a SaaS world where data lives in the cloud, and individuals have no significant leverage once a certain level of monopoly or oligopoly becomes established. What good is choice, if there are only lies to choose from?
In order to avoid a situation where people and individuals have no practical choice in these matters, we need to establish a place in “the cloud” where the individual starts by having total control, where they can then require other individuals and external entitites come to them where the default will be privacy, if not secrecy, if not security;. At least then there will be an understood and practical alternative and reference point for what private and personal even means, where people can actually decide if they want to surrender or share a certain level of control with some external entity.
From an architectural and technological standpoint, we can relatively easily provide a private and secure place for the individual to store their own medical records. Then, if they want to give access to their doctor, they can do so. If the doctor requests permission to be able to reference their case in the future, they might provide that, providing that the doctor agrees not to share that with others. If that information somehow gets out, they will know that it was that particular doctor, and word will travel pretty quickly that the doctor didn’t honor the doctor/patient relationship.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single organism that has succeeded/survived/thrived where the individual in the end didn’t have final say and control. Does anything remotely resembling the borg actually exist anywhere in nature? I don’t actually know, it’s a non-rhetorical question.
If not, then why are we heading further and further down the road where individuals, as a part of larger organizations, no longer have any real decision-making power? Have you ever talked to a cell phone company representative? You might as well be talking to the company’s computer system, where the representative can only really follow policies that have been set somewhere centrally by some sort of bean counter. I have thankfully not had to deal with a case of an insurance company overriding the judgment of a doctor, but I imagine it is quite the same.
We should start moving in the opposite direction, where people are in control of their own context, in their own community, without anything “above” them in authority that can sweep down from the sky/net and literally take their life at any time. Do we know that these behaviors have definitely made the world a better place? That question, on the other hand, is rhetorical. First, let us all do no harm.
Filed under: sphere, tagging
The SupraSphere tagging engine is one of the most unique and innovative features of the system. We have taken a very different approach to tagging, almost redefining it to the point that we could reasonably call it something else!
In any case, our tagging engine has numerous different and highly compelling attributes:
- When tagging an item, you can use multiple words in a single tag
- When an item is tagged multiple times, it creates a relationship between the different tags
- Tags are included as a part of search, so that even if a message, file, email, contact or other asset type do not have the keyword that is being searched, they will show up in the result set as a result of matching a tag
- You can tag items in a search result with whatever keyword was searched for, making it very easy to associate new tags with assets just through normal usage
- From a tag, you can get to all items associated with a tag very quickly, including other tags, making it much faster and more efficient than folders almost ensuring that you will never not be able to get back to your information
- Tags also work as hyperlinks. If you are in a group sphere or different sphere other than your own personal sphere, you can get an auto-complete listing of all of your historical tags, at which point anyone else in the sphere will be able to see all items that you have associated with the tag, including other tags
- In “Anonymous SupraSearch” (you can configure SS so that it exposes a search engine of all indexed bookmarks across all spheres), it will show all tags associated with any items that comes in the results page, so that you can click to find highly related items to whatever shows up in the results
- There is something we call “Re-Search” that is a configurable option that will go into either your own personal tag repository (located in your personal sphere), or other users’ spheres, and highlight any word on the page that corresponds to a tag
- Contact names are automatically treated as tags, so that you can search either one degree or multiple degrees away to see if you or anyone in your supra sphere knows anyone written about in an email or on a web page
- You can match against a history of tags of everyone in a sphere. This is similar to re-search, but allows matching on an object basis.
These are just some of what the tagging engine can do. Tags are integrated deep inside and across the entire system, and we have many more plans for how we will use tags, such as for keyword alerting, monitoring RSS feeds, and for SPAM filtering. In many respects, the tagging engine makes our back-end architecture function very similar to a database filesystem. We would sincerely welcome researchers who are interested in experimenting with new concepts around tags!
Filed under: email, messaging, sphere
It’s now common knowledge that Mozilla wants to do an overhaul of Thunderbird. As for the progress they have thus far in fixing email and messaging, it’s too soon to tell. Don’t think I am a Thunderbird hater, I actually use it to manage my Gmail accounts when I’m on my laptop. However, my personal opinion is that you can’t fix email (and clients for that matter) if they aren’t broken.
Gmail as a web-based client is really nice, I must say. I’ve never really used Microsoft Outlook (except in college) so I can’t really voice my opinion on that. Evolution mail was nice considering Ubuntu integrated it into their desktop edition, but it was lacking in many areas, including the lack of Gmail support. Given the fact that the Thunderbird project is now being headed by Mozilla Messaging, could this mean that in the future, IM is incorporated into their email client? That has yet to be seen, but it’s beginning to look that way, considering the vision statement on the official website and news items like this. Funny thing is, there is this quote of interest:
“We’d like Thunderbird to do searches across common archives and have a better focal point and search system,” said Asher.
We are already there with the wonders of SupraSearch.
Now, the beauty of SS is the amazing *fanfare* email capabilities. Not only is SS an email client, but it is also mail server as well. Having this ability makes it that much easier to set up custom rules for mailing lists, automatic forwarding, and you can even forward mail into different spheres. The idea is that you can set it up to forward any message created in a sphere to forward either to all contacts, all members, or specific other email addresses. The cool thing about that is that when people reply, the reply will go directly into the sphere. It’s sort of like a shared “Sent Mail”, where all members of a sphere can see the sent mail at the same time, and when the person replies, it will show up in the sphere in real-time for all members to see. Attachments are easy to send, also enabling saving documents directly to the server. Interestingly, SS auto-converts all office documents to PDF format to make them fully searchable.
It just goes to show we do messaging differently.
Filed under: cloud, economy, sphere
I had an interesting meeting couple of days ago with Andy Lippmann of the MIT Media Lab. He had a hard time seeing the connection between the idea of a secure, private, “personal cloud” and currency, so I figure I have a lot of work to do if someone so esteemed as Dr. Lippmann does not see the connection as obviously and clearly as I do.
First off, there are different connotations of currency, many of which have nothing to do with quantification and numerical accounting, particularly in traditionally understood units and/or denominations. Most people have heard of the concepts of “social capital” or “political capital”, for example. In considering different ideas around currency, there is also a question as to whether currencies are “convertible” into dollars or exchangeable into other forms of currency in other communities and networks beyond those in which they originate. As an example, many people have heard of “Linden Dollars” from the video game “Second Life”, which do have an implicit conversion rate to US dollars. Compare them to World of Warcraft Gold, which, while it used to be purchasable on eBay before eBay explicitly banned the practice, has no implicitly set conversion rate.
Because of my background, I have a fairly good grasp of traditional money and how it works as a system. Most people know that SupraSphere has several installations in some financial services institutions, particularly hedge funds. This has afforded me a pretty in-depth look at how the financial system functions and how people who trade stocks and focus fanatically on increasing the amount of money they have actually think.
Everyone knows that money makes the world go round and is the bottom line. This is why I have been so fascinated by it. It’s more pervasive and prevalent, by far, than any single other psychological construct in the world. As a mindset, it far surpasses both television and organized religion combined in its ability to generate a unified and homogenized world view. So, having grown up in a fairly socially conscious and idealistic family, I was drawn to thinking of the structure and design of money as a particularly fun and challenging lever to pull in terms of changing the world. If there were one single underlying construct where changing its definition would have the single most substantial effect on the world, it would clearly be with money itself.
That said, banking and financial systems themselves are at the core actually very simple accounting systems that only really become complex by how people try to game them, all under the guise of “creating efficiencies”. You deduct from one place, you add to another. Transferring funds is really not that complicated a process. The overall point is that as it becomes more and more the case that money exists primarily a digital phenomenon consisting of overlapping interactions of accounts (in some ways actually a “social network”), how complex is banking really that people can’t have direct control over the overall process of issuing and managing currency? The most important thing to think of in this case is the creation/issuance of money and its underlying definition and value, which is already assumed when you get into the accounting stage. However, if people have their own set of servers (spheres) that can create intersecting relationships with other spheres (accounts), we might very well be able to enter into an era of “open source money”.
Before I get into specifics about how SupraSphere can help to “open source money”, I will provide some more perspective on my background for more context. I have long been a fan of free software, ever since I first compiled a Linux kernel on an old 386 at the Shiva Corporation in high school in the early 90’s. This was before Windows for Workgroups even, where DOS still ruled the roost and where Microsoft was just starting to enter the world of GUIs that Apple Macs had been in for 10 years prior. I had a simple thought. If DOS was more popular than Macs because it was more open, easier to tinker with and fix despite being ridiculously harder to use, then Linux would eventually be more popular than DOS for the same reason, which I incidentally think also applies to Windows NT.
While I loved Linux and tried to install it everywhere I could, my father absolutely hated how I couldn’t see that DOS and Windows were more important for business and that I was investing so much time in a hobbled platform with pretty much no important or critical applications. In fact, if you ask my two younger brothers, they would attest to how much my distaste for the Windows platform actually hurt my relationship with my father who would spend hours trying to lecture me into using Windows. The smart money went with Microsoft, but I didn’t care. It was too late. I had bought into this whole “freedom and openness” thing and was still a bit too isolated from the real world of bills and mortgages to think that I was potentially compromising my future earnings.
Instead, I started to think even more abstractly in terms of currency, value, and exchange. I thought it was really spectacular that GNU/Linux, when considered together, represents the largest collaborative engineering project ever undertaken by humanity, and was being built at the time mostly by volunteers who believed in a common cause of creating a better system than Windows. I know Linus has said that he has never wanted to destroy Windows and instead only focuses on making Linux better, but those of us who adopted Linux as a platform were drawn to a common cause that there simply had to be something better than Windows (particularly because we were the ones who had to fix it for all of our friends and family), not to mention that we hated the idea in principle of a company’s making computers intentionally incompatible or hard to work with, given how hard in general it is to get them to work right in the first place.
So GNU/Linux is a system comprising attributes of emergence, self-governance, anarchy, evolution, openness, freedom, and now with some Ubuntu thrown in. But, there is no real business model for it. There are some awkward ways for businesses to make money off of it, usually involving support and customization, but those have their own problems. Imagine instead if the profit motive could be directly aligned and intertwined with open source software production.
Another area that has no proper business model is digital music. Despite the success of iTunes, I have never bought a single song on it. I hate the idea that I could lose access to what I have paid thousands of dollars for just for moving to a different computer, not to mention that it doesn’t even run on Linux. My mother can’t use it in Hong Kong and many people don’t have access to it around the world. Why would I endorse such a thing as the “proper” solution to how music should be considered in the digital Internet age? Not to mention, I have used better systems, such as AllofMP3 and OINK, which were both actually better than Napster ever was, IMHO.
I think in both cases, GNU/Linux (and other open source systems, including suprasphere) and digital music, we need to think differently about money itself in order to come up with a solution to the problem of how artists will get paid and how to ensure freedom while still being able to make money on software. The key is to think of “creating money” instead of “making money”. Given that two gigantic forces are on a collision course, the financial system on the one hand, and the Internet, which comprises digitally distributed music and video, collaboratively developed free software, the web (both 2.0 and 3.0) ;) on the other, which would you bet will come out on top?
The truth is that the transactional efficiencies and network externalities of the web put the entire financial system to shame. There were hints of this back in the web 1.0 bubble days of the “new economy”. People thought that Internet companies didn’t need to conform to old concepts of “revenue”, “profit”, and “cost of goods sold”. Eyeballs were the new currency of the day. Well, I don’t think it’s as far from what the truth could be, assuming that people allow that the nature of money itself (as opposed to just the application of it) can actually be changed. Even as people talk about a new bubble, and people wonder how companies like Facebook will ever live up to their valuation, I think we can take steps to move the entire financial system on to the architecture of the Internet and the Web, and make it open source on top of it!
In fact, I have numerous times heard the semantic web referred to as an “information bus” (TechnicaLee Speaking), and we are starting to see the convergence of the semantic web and the activities of general financial services companies such as with Reuters Calais. What else is the financial system but a global information bus? Why else would financial services companies want to integrate instant messaging into the kernel of an operating system?
Even as suprasphere contains pretty amazing technology and is a very unique and innovative application, we are not proposing as a vision something that isn’t already happening. Instead, we are trying to suggest clearly what it all adds up to, and certainly hope that suprasphere serves as a reference point outside of just giving us some credibility to suggest this broader vision.
So, here we go. What if, each time an individual or group invents a new concept in a unique semantic namespace, a currency (stock) account for that unique new namespace was also simultaneously created? Such a namespace could represent a new music album, website, Linux module, or just about any project. As other people linked to that unique namespace, downloaded from that namespace, collaborated around that namespace, the stock of of that entity would automatically rise as more people used it and interacted with it. The more interest in the creative output of the group responsible for the project, the more interest would accrue in their account. This even has analogies in the “peer to patent” proposal for how to reform the patent system.
So as currency accumulates in an account/sphere, it can be spent just like with “normal money”, but every time it gets spent (on things like clothes, food, cars, etc.), it must get spent as a proportion of the interest and the principal. As soon as the principal is gone, it can no longer accrue interest. Perhaps if it’s invested in somebody else’s sphere as both interest and principal, it can accrue interest on both. There might be an expiration point where after accumulating interest for so long, the namespace itself becomes public domain.
Or not. That was my freestyle idea of how it might work, but the exact model and details are truly open for debate and dialog, which should at the very least feel exceptionally empowering in and of itself. At this point the details of how the system can work are not as important as achieving consensus around the overall premise, where we can start to set in motion the conditions where the exact attributes can emerge and evolve. Just like the financial system (and the credit system for that matter), one can’t design and manage it centrally in a command-and-control fashion, but we can set in motion the idea that people can be in true control over their own bank account and concept of “net worth” and allow a new system to emerge in true chaordic fashion.
I realize that this is in many respects a crazy idea. I have not only been thinking and talking along these lines for a long time, but also working extremely hard each and every day to help bring this about. However, every day that goes forward the greater the intellectual risk as I spend more social capital to keep the dialog open and the greater the possibility that someday I will wake up bankrupt, not just in my bank account but in the lack of people who care enough even to have a conversation about these concepts. I have sacrificed many, many years pursuing this core idea, and ask that you forgive the raw and unbaked nature of my presentation, and instead of only finding fault and poking holes and dismissing this outright, please give it a chance. We are at a tricky time in the world, with crises and problems of seemingly insurmountable proportion everywhere we look, and as a result I think we deserve the right to think openly and freely about the nature of money, and seize the opportunity to fashion it along lines that will support each of our grandest goals and ambitions.
Filed under: blogging, cloud, sphere
The New York Times recently published an article about Adobe Air and the blurring of traditional web and desktop application development:
Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web
and there is a nice FAQ from Adobe on the differences and advantages of the Air approach:
Adobe Air FAQ
I feel that we have a fairly deep perspective on the differences and advantages of desktop applications vs. web applications. SupraSphere, being first and foremost and new kind of web browser, is obviously a desktop application since it doesn’t necessarily make sense to think of a web browser as an AJAX application. ;)
However, we do have a web-only AJAX version of some of the features of SupraSphere, particularly some of the search and collaboration features. Desktop applications have a few distinct disadvantages, around management of updates, stability, and often privacy, where many people have gotten burned by desktop applications infested with spyware and adware. Furthermore, web applications are quite often much easier to use since all you can really do is click. The richness of certain interfaces, whether in Flash or on the desktop, often make it harder to use the applications because people often have a hard time learning new interfaces. Browser applications are often popular because it provides a “paradigm sandbox” where you can click and go back, often can’t “right-click”, and can’t bury too many options too deep in menu structures. Most people can figure out Flash navigation on a website, but as soon as you start developing applications in Flash, people are going to start to get lost.
As far as Adobe Air, it seems that the major innovation is that Adobe Air allows an application written with web technologies (javascript particularly) that uses a RIA Flash runtime, but that can operate on local desktop data, which also implies offline access. This is definitely interesting, but we have taken a different approach to unifying the web and the pc.
Our goal is to create a “personal cloud” (see the reference to “kevincloud” in the NY Times article). Ideally, this would involve multiple servers (or virtual servers) configured as peered instances, where all data is replicated across instances hopefully across data centers. This would provide automated backup and redundancy so that a person’s entire data environment is not dependent on any given provider, and we might look into a default configuration being an encrypted disk (with only one service on one port running to provide suprasphere services), so that if a virtual machine instance was “lost”, it wouldn’t be as huge of a privacy concern.
Then, all devices (including personal computers) would provide a view of the data stored in this “cluster” of personal servers. In addition, these systems will not be single-user. They are inherently network aware and multi-user, making it possible to collaborate inside with other individuals or groups, but where the underlying architecture will be distributed.
Essentially, rather than trying to move web applications back to the PC hard drive in order just to provide richer interfaces and private data access, we are trying to provide the equivalent to the PC hard drive that “lives in the cloud”. This should provide all of the attributes that people associate with cloud computing, such as data reliability and high availability, API’s for services integration and re-purposing, and multiple views of data from different interface mashups. In fact, it should accelerate these trends by providing a starting point for web services that are private to the individual and highly personal.
Filed under: blogging, bookmarks, commenting, messaging, sphere
It’s ironic in a way to be using SS to write about it. However, it kind of serves as a practical application of SS’s uses.
Like any typical article that gets written, there is a planning stage. So, usually that begins with a startup of SupraSphere. I have a sphere set up called “Supra Blog Team” which is where I usually post ideas for the next couple of posts. David will usually refine the ideas via terse. After I have a set topic to write about, I *usually* will write a message outline, which I’ve not really gotten into yet with the posts here, but that’s going to be the next one. Commenting on it, it will receive some tweaks, and then I will start the writing process.
From right within SS, I’ll hit <crtl-t> which just like Firefox, opens a new tab, and I log into the blog and start writing. I should mention here that Wordpress is fully functional while in SS as well. Extra tabs also mean it’s easy to search for more information so I can flesh out ideas.
After I get a rough draft, I save the preliminary version, and preview it in another tab. Using the bookmark feature, I then post the bookmark in the Blog Team sphere. David will read it from there, and then using the comment feature to tweak it some more, editing it for grammar and the like. Then, finally, I’ll get the green light to click on “Publish” and another post goes live.
Filed under: sphere
In the last post, I gave somewhat of a brief outline of what SupraSphere is.
Now it’s an opportune time for me to explain just what my favorite thing aspect of SupraSphere. *grins* In fact, spheres really make up what this project is.
A sphere is this container for all different sorts of information, including messaging, RSS feeds, bookmarks, emails and other sources. But, it’s more than just a giant bubble, in that you can share this sphere with other people so that you can collaborate on projects easily in a secure environment. Another great thing is you can have more than one sphere open. So that would mean you can share the same or different pieces of information with different or the same people. You can choose who has access to spheres.
Another feature within spheres is the security. All incoming and outgoing communication is strongly encrypted and has an authentication layer called a “Zero Knowledge Proof”.
When it comes to working collaboratively, one consideration is the extensive management possibilities of any given sphere that you create. Honestly, I love to oversee things, being able to customize and such. So being able to manage privileges and preferences and make work flow rules for the people I share spheres with makes my life a whole lot easier. I can delegate certain things to certain people, and make sure everyone knows what they are doing so we as a team can accomplish things.
Now what happens when I am busy working on a project outside of SupraSphere? That’s simple: I can actually set a preference to notify me if I get any information sent to me by way of the system tray, blinking, and pop-ups. These simple ways to get someone’s attention are really handy! If it’s an urgent message, or even if you are just saying hi, it’s really great to know that your message will be received. :) In fact, as mentioned before, when a message is read, you can find out through a graphical confirmation. The recipient’s name or names will change color when they read it.
Too bad we don’t have that feature in blogs yet!
Andria
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
No Comments »