Unhosted web apps: freedom from web 2.0's monopoly platforms
unhosted.org
unhosted.org
I created Servant (https://www.servant.co) as different expression of these themes, with an emphasis on convenience, as well as user and developer experience.
- A Servant hosts your data separately from the apps you use in the cloud. (Centralized, but there is more to it...)
- You can connect your Servant via Oauth2 to share your data with any app.
- The data is kept in fixed formats to promote using the same data across multiple applications – https://github.com/servant-app/json-archetypes
- You pay Servant by purchasing API Requests to transmit data. Your fees are passed through Servant to the developers of the apps that put your data to use via API Tracking on Servant's end.
– Further, apps get access to users' credit card information and can charge users without needing to prompt them for payment information.
– And much more...
My skype ID: austencollins
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Some of the mechanisms of Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook can easily be mapped to an email like protocol. Friend requests correspond to whitelisting or a special filter on the mails you receive, same goes for "Circles". Hashtags would similarly correspond to potentially dynamic mailing lists, that could be hosted by basically anyone and indexed by a separate service.
To publish something on "your wall" just send an email to a mailing list you control, to make a post "private" just encrypt it using the public key of your indented recipients, etc.
The problem with todays services is that they don't rely on a publicly defined protocol and essentially dumb if somewhat elaborate implementation of that protocol, but instead offer a public "open" API to a service that is proprietary.
Also too many people are probably caught up in thinking about the web only in terms of http and neglect to think about the possibilities of services that don't fit neatly in that framework. Especially convenient save encryption is not implementable in the browser without plugins at the moment, as far as I can see.
1) Web app inside user browser (unhosted app seems to be defined as an app that runs in the browser, client side)
2) Web app communicates with a 'personal server', basically a server that handles that and only that users data
3) 'personal server' is the thing that brokers connections with the outside world, but doesn't have to interact with a browser app if it isn't required to.
4) Here comes the bit that's actually hard and it gets a bit low on detail:
"There are situations where going through a third party is unavoidable, for instance if a certain guitar dealer only sells on eBay, or a certain friend of yours only posts on Facebook. For each of these "worlds", we will develop application-agnostic gateway modules that we can add to our personal server. Usually this will require having a "puppet" account in that world, which this gateway module can control. Sometimes, it is necessary to use an API key before your personal server can connect to control your "puppet", but these are usually easy to obtain. To the people in each world, your puppet will look just like any other user account in there. But the gateway module on your personal server allows unhosted web apps to control it, and to "see" what it sees.
Needless to say, it's harder than you've stated.
Given the fact that:
a) until today, the commercial service/app/device/app store providers have always had all the market power (and it has gotten even worse), and
b) lots of users currently still don't seem to care about privacy,
how do you see that concept gaining serious ground?
EDIT: (other than for niche situations like human rights activists, journalists, whistleblowers, etc.)