January 7, 2012

Who else is working on this stuff?

None of the ideas in the ClearSky concept are original to me. This is sort of the zeitgeist of the times. Here's a list of people and projects that have thought about or are working on the same problem:

The basic idea stems back to the home media convergence attempts of the late 90s (and indeed Tonido is still following this marketing strategy).

Why no one has been successful so far is that the solutions offered are too hard to use (if it's any harder than Facebook, very few people will use it), don't address the issue of replication (Tonido and Opera Unite, for example), and don't have sustainable revenue models. I think that with the right design, engineering and business approach, these problems are not insurmountable.

You might notice I left out one project: Diaspora. A look at Diaspora's source code should convince you that while the project claims the same goals, the approach they're taking does not address any of the three aspects mentioned above.

2 comments:

Demyan Rogozhin said...

Did you saw this post?

http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/04/10/towards-a-gnu-autonomous-cloud

It maybe huge, Andy Wingo always do huge postings, but it's related.

Also I like his post about capabilities on the web:
http://wingolog.org/archives/2011/03/24/storage-primitives-for-the-distributed-web

Vladimir Sedach said...

Oh man, I don't know how I missed that post on Andy's blog. I haven't been reading his blog lately because he has moved to the dark side and writes about SSA now (CPS or bust for me). :)

Thanks for the link! I think I'll contact him to see if he has any further thoughts on this.