Upon 2020

Category: Big Picture

  • Personal Cloud Architecture

    Updated 2012-11-01 based on discussion on the Personal Clouds mailing list. See also Phil Windley’s comments. Last week’s IIW, as usual, facilitated a lot of interesting discussions including on the subject of Personal Clouds. It was the prompt for me to sit down and draw an “architecture” for Personal Clouds, which is consistent with the…

  • Why Decentralized Software Is 10x Harder

    The Diaspora* guys announced today: Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community. which has widely been interpreted as giving up on the grand vision of decentralized social networking. The remaining Diaspora team apparently (I’d guess based on advice they got from YCombinator) will focus on a more standard “we run an ad-supported…

  • Finally somebody does it: HealthTAP

    Healthtap is a startup in Palo Alto that does something I’d been hoping for: it connects patients and doctors directly, via an iPad app, instead of indirectly through layers of receptionists, offices, schedules, and insurance policies. They are still young, and the functionality they offer is very limited, but one can see where this is…

  • Exactly

  • LID, OpenID and the Personal Cloud

    When I started working on LID — the first proposal for a decentralized web identity system — about eight years ago, I did not just have a set of techie protocols in mind, but a technical architecture with social ramifications: people would grab a URL (say http://upon2020.com/), and set up their personal web presence at…