Social everything

Many of us, use a range of range of so-called Web2.0 services.

• Social bookmarking which enables you to recommend sites as well as tag sites with relevant words to make searching easier.
• Microblogging services allowing you to inform your friends (and others) of your status, while attaching tags to the message.
• Systems which note the music you have listened to recently and share that with the community, recommending other music and events.
• You can declare yourself as going to an event and check if your friends are too.

This is a system which will keep expanding and undoubtedly within a couple years your bike will send out a message to say you are stuck in traffic which warns your friends that you will be late, while telling others to avoid your route. As you take a photo of the space invader mosaic, your phone will ping out the image with its GPS position to an urban art site with the tag of the artist, while informing you that there is another one just round the corner.

Fear of clouds

Great! The future is awesome! Well, not quite. There are several weaknesses to these systems.

• Each system requires a sign-up. There are solutions like OpenID which make this easier, but generally you cannot use them anonymously very easily.
• There are multiple providers for each kind of service, so you may have to keep several profiles up to date and post your data to several services.
• The data is transferred to the service owners so only one company can make use of it. Users are giving this data out for free, and that’s the way they would like to keep it.
• Services close. If you have built up a massive profile of contributions with millions of followers and the service dies, you are left with nothing. No you can’t take the data and create your own.
• Competition is stifled. Imagine that you thought of a system like Facebook but better. Who would sign up for that? There is no chance of cooperation between companies to allow new competitors.
• It is difficult to queue up data when not connected to the internet. You have to wait till you get home to write a review of that restaurant in Thailand which does great tofu.

So, this “Tidbit” thing?

The principle is pretty simple. You don’t send your data directly to the service provides, but to a distributed open database. Each piece of information is a “tidbit”. Anyone can post, read and search for these tidbits. If you wish to provide a service, you read the tidbits that are of interest to you. No one gets to keep a monopoly on the data and everyone has the opportunity to to use the data to make new inspired products.

Anatomy of a tidbit

Each tidbit contains:

• Your username. The username is actually your public signing key. You can generate a new one whenever you like and is completely private (unless you reveal your identity to someone).
• The date the tidbit was created and when it should expire. Most data becomes irrelevant after a year so that is the default unless you set it to be longer.
• The table the data belongs in. For example “audio/track” would be talking about an audio track you have listened to.
• A set of key value pairs which hold the data you wish to tell the world. There is no fixed structure so your tidbit can contain fields which will be ignored by some applications.
• A signature to make sure it was you that generated that tidbit. It is impossible to adjust the data without damaging the signature, so no one can spoof as you.

You can’t trust this

Stop! Reality time! This is bound to be abused by spammers, robots etc, just like the current services, but worse. I can’t trust anyone.

On top of this system, you can extend a web of trust. You can post a tidbit stating your trust of someone. Say you only fully trust the 10 people you know, but they trust 10 more and so on. You might only trust an individual a little (since they are several friends away), but if you combine a whole group of people you trust a bit, you get a fairly sensible picture. You can also partly trust someone who you have only a little confidence in due to information they posted, and perhaps only for some kinds of information (music taste only). Producers of original content are thus rewarded with respect of their audience, while building a network that gives people confidence in the data.

I want my privacy

Privacy is at the core of the system. You may choose to only reveal your username to your friends. Only they will know who you are. All applications work with a different auto-generated username, so unless you manually set your movie watching application to use the same username as your dating profile, you essentially remain as two different people. Obviously, all data you post is open for anyone to read, so posting personal information is a bad idea. This is not a system which sensibly replaces private social networks.

Let’s get technical

The next post will be somewhat more technical and explain the system in glorious geeky detail. There is a git repository you can take a look at and if you have questions there is a room #tidbit on irc.freenode.net, or leave a comment or email me.