2012/Browser Social Store
Browser Social Store was a session at IndieWebCamp 2012.
Notes from: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/indieweb-browsersoc
When: 2012-06-30 11:15
Once we have decided we should own our stuff, we could all put our content on personal servers, or we could store/host that in our browsers. (other options too?)
This is possible because browsers now let you store data, install apps, etc.
Server does 2 things:
- store the data
- let you access this over the network when you are elsewhere
Examples: Singly, IFTT
Peer-to-peer is tough Maybe use webrtc?
Could hijack existing social software interfaces with a browser extension, creating a kind of locker, users would be able to make use of the tool passively
Brittle by definition, websites change But Chrome gives more options to listen in on the traffic
Data store is the first step, the second is to serve the data back to people
We don't have to recreate all the apps, we just need a way to bring all our data back together
But we do have to bring the data back out, so what does that look like? A big meta feed?
People doing this helps their friends discover their content online
What happens when the user's browser is offline? We could push it out like a broadcast when there are updates, we could mirror or cache the content on server. Does it need to be accessible all the time? Could be a different way of interacting with people, showing presence.
"Bringing presence back into social networking is something interesting."
The data relay could be like an irc server: today I connect to this one, tomorrow I might work through another
The relay or server is a block, someone could shut it down, but the only way to completely avoid that is a ptp solution.
Browser plugins are increasingly html/javascript, reducing the need to per-browser specialization
Storing in the browser still creates a point of failure--the user's computer itself. How do we sync the data, have access, and keep it safe? Browser syncing between machines could help, but data would need to be encrypted.
What to hack on tomorrow? Can we store and serve the data from some social sites?
The best part is side-stepping all the APIs, having access to the data from outside that system and agreement.