A huge opportunity awaits a young social media company that is poised to take advantage of the fall of Facebook (and Twitter). Is somebody out there ready to carry the ball and make it happen. It probably has to be somebody already with most of this done, or even operating.

Last night I gave a short talk at the 3rd "Personal Clouds" meeting in San Francisco, The term "personal clouds" is a bit vague at present, but in part it describes what I had proposed in 2008 as the "data deposit box" -- a means to acheive the various benefits of corporate-hosted cloud applications in computing space owned and controlled by the user. Other people are interpreting the phrase "personal clouds" to mean mechanisms for the user to host, control or monetize their own data, to control their relationships with vendors and others who will use that data, or in the simplest form, some people are using it to refer to personal resources hosted in the cloud, such as cloud disk drive services like Dropbox.

I continue to focus on the vision of providing the advantages of cloud applications closer to the user, bringing the code to the data (as was the case in the PC era) rather than bringing the data to the code (as is now the norm in cloud applications.)

Consider the many advantages of cloud applications for the developer:

• You write and maintain your code on machines you build, configure and maintain.
  • That means none of the immense support headaches of trying to write software to run on mulitple OSs, with many versions and thousands of variations. (Instead you do have to deal with all the browsers but that's easier.)
  • It also means you control the uptime and speed
  • Users are never running old versions of your code and facing upgrade problems
  • You can debug, monitor, log and fix all problems with access to the real data
• You can sell the product as a service, either getting continuing revenue or advertising revenue
• You can remove features, shut down products
• You can control how people use the product and even what steps they may take to modify it or add plug-ins or 3rd party mods
• You can combine data from many users to make compelling applications, particuarly in the social space
• You can track many aspects of single and multiple user behaviour to customize services and optimize advertising, learning as you go

Some of those are disadvantages for the user of course, who has given up control. And there is one big disadvantage for the provider, namely they have to pay for all the computing resources, and that doesn't scale -- 10x users can mean paying 10x as much for computing, especially if the cloud apps run on top of a lower level cloud cluster which is sold by the minute.

But users see advantages too:

Two upcoming talks:

Tomorrow (April 4) I will give a very short talk at the meeting of the personal clouds interest group. As far as I know, I was among the first to propose the concept of the personal cloud in my essages on the Data Deposit Box back in 2007, and while my essays are not the reason for it, the idea is gaining some traction now as more and more people think about the consequences of moving everything into the corporate clouds.

For some time I've been advocating a concept I call the Data Deposit Box as an architecture for providing social networking and personal data based applications in a distributed way that tries to find a happy medium between the old PC (your data live on your machine) and the modern cloud (your data live on 3rd party corporate machines) approach. The basic concept is to have a piece of cloud that you legally own (a data deposit box) where your data lives, and code from applications comes and runs on your box, but displays to your browser directly. This is partly about privacy, but mostly about interoperability and control.

This concept depends on the idea of publishing and subscribing to feeds from your friends (and other sources.) Your friends are updating data about themselves, and you might want to see it -- ie. things like the Facebook wall, or Twitter feed. Feeds themselves would go through brokers just for the sake of efficiency, but would be encrypted so the brokers can't actually read them.

There is a need for brokers which do see the data in certain cases, and in fact there's a need that some types of data are never shown to your friends.

Crush

One classic example is the early social networking application the "crush" detector. In this app you get to declare a crush on a friend, but this is only revealed when both people have a mutual crush. Clearly you can't just be sending your crush status to your friends. You need a 3rd party who gets the status of both of you, and only alerts you when the crush is mutual. (In some cases applications like this can be designed to work without the broker knowing your data through the process known as blinding (cryptography).)

There's been a well justified storm about Facebook's recent privacy changes. The EFF has a nice post outlining the changes in privacy policies at Facebook which inspired this popular graphic showing those changes.

But the deeper question is why Facebook wants to do this. The answer, of course, is money, but in particular it's because the market is assigning a value to revealed data. This force seems to push Facebook, and services like it, into wanting to remove privacy from their users in a steadily rising trend. Social network services often will begin with decent privacy protections, both to avoid scaring users (when gaining users is the only goal) and because they have little motivation to do otherwise. The old world of PC applications tended to have strong privacy protection (by comparison) because data stayed on your own machine. Software that exported it got called "spyware" and tools were created to rout it out.

Facebook began as a social tool for students. It even promoted that those not at a school could not see in, could not even join. When this changed (for reasons I will outline below) older members were shocked at the idea their parents and other adults would be on the system. But Facebook decided, correctly, that excluding them was not the path to being #1.

With Facebook seeming to declare some sort of war on privacy, it's time to expand the concept I have been calling "Data Hosting" -- encouraging users to have some personal server space where their data lives, and bringing the apps to the data rather than sending your data to the companies providing interesting apps.

I think of this as something like a "safe deposit box" that you can buy from a bank. While not as sacrosanct as your own home when it comes to privacy law, it's pretty protected. The bank's role is to protect the box -- to let others into it without a warrant would be a major violation of the trust relationship implied by such boxes. While the company owning the servers that you rent could violate your trust, that's far less likely than 3rd party web sites like Facebook deciding to do new things you didn't authorize with the data you store with them. In the case of those companies, it is in fact their whole purpose to think up new things to do with your data.

Nonetheless, building something like Facebook using one's own data hosting facilities is more difficult than the way it's done now. That's because you want to do things with data from your friends, and you may want to combine data from several friends to do things like search your friends.

One way to do this is to develop a "feed" of information about yourself that is relevant to friends, and to authorize friends to "subscribe" to this feed. Then, when you update something in your profile, your data host would notify all your friend's data hosts about it. You need not notify all your friends, or tell them all the same thing -- you might authorize closer friends to get more data than you give to distant ones.

There is some controversy, including a critique from our team at the EFF of Facebook's new privacy structure, and their new default and suggested policies that push people to expose more of their profile and data to "everyone."

I understand why Facebook finds this attractive. "Everyone" means search engines like Google, and also total 3rd party apps like those that sprung up around Twitter.

I've written about "data hosting/data deposit box" as an alternative to "cloud computing." Cloud computing is timesharing -- we run our software and hold our data on remote computers, and connect to them from terminals. It's a swing back from personal computing, where you had your own computer, and it erases the 4th amendment by putting our data in the hands of others.

Recently, I wrote about thedata deposit box, an architecture where applications come to the data rather than copying your personal data to all the applications.

Let me examine some more of the pros and cons of this approach:

I've been ranting of late about the dangers inherent in "Data Portability" which I would like to rename as BEPSI to avoid the motherhood word "portability" for something that really has a strong dark side as well as its light side.

But it's also important to come up with an alternative. I think the best alternative may lie in what I would call a "data deposit box" (formerly "data hosting.") It's a layered system, with a data layer and an application layer on top. Instead of copying the data to the applications, bring the applications to the data.

A data deposit box approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. That server's duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That's what you're paying for. Legally, you "own" it, either directly, or in the same sense as you have legal rights when renting an apartment -- or a safety deposit box.

Your data box's job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.

As such, you don't join a site like Facebook or LinkedIn. Rather, companies like those build applications and application containers which can run on your data. They don't get the data, rather they write code that works with the data and runs in a protected sandbox on your data host -- and then displays the results directly to you.

To take a simple example, imagine a social application wishes to send a message to all your friends who live within 100 miles of you. Using permission tokens provided by you, it is able to connect to your data host and ask it to create that subset of your friend network, and then e-mail a message to that subset. It never sees the friend network at all.