After a fairly long hiatus, I've decided to revisit WordPress. My break away was due to a plugin that broke the entire setup so I could no longer log in.
With various programs at work and the time at home, this was left to just collect dust.
I am hoping to use this a little more consistently - but only time will tell.
I saw a post recently asking if I would pay for Hulu to watch it on my TV.
Surprising, this sturred some level of emotion in me. First off, I wouldn't pay for a dime for Hulu considering there are adverts in the streams. If they removed the adverts, I still wouldn't pay because the content is unreliable and the HD delivery method is clumsy - at best. It requires faster then needed hardware because of a poor software design choices - using a Flash based video player may reach to most of your audience, but so would just using an embedded video. The later can take advantage of the latest optimized codecs - which allows for any modern video firmware set to do the bulk load of the work instead of the CPU, allowing for a slower cheaper CPU. Hulu is handy for archived video, but not live streams - it just can't scale up against people wanting to watch some sporting event or historic moment.
This whole thing got me thinking as to why Hulu even exists. It's really just out of conveniance - it's almost your one stop shop for catching up on any TV show you're interested in. You don't have to know if the the show is produced by Fox, NBC, or ABC, you just go to it and it'll have it. It seems reasonable, but I could just go to Google, and search for my TV show of interest. So perhaps that isn't the business void it's trying to fill. To me it just doesn't add up.
Totally off topic, but...
It amazes me that with the minimal infrastructure overhead that DishNetwork and DirectTV have compared to cable ops, that they haven't annihilated them in pricing them out of business. Granted they have a /HUGE/ capital investment of putting a satellite in the air, but once that is done, everything else in comparison is cheap. Compare that to the infrastructure upkeep cost of all the cable wiring associated with telcos and cable ops across a metro area.
It equally amazes me that in more recent time, that cable ops and local telcos haven't figured out they they have the infrastructure (copper wise) to provide true on demand and world wide streaming of live TV (assuming that all their routing equipment supported igmpv3.)
Im not sure if Verizon is continuing with fios (fiber to the curb) which makes sense from the perspective of new home construction, but IMHO too costly for existing neighborhood infrastructure - and in either case its much easier to patch dug-up/fallen copper then fiber.
ATT U-verse still has that risk, but with fiber to the hub, its somewhat de-risked the last mile.
I believe this will be a come-back opportunity for land line telco's, considering how much business they have lost over the years to the cellular industry (although for some of them, like AT&T and Verizon, the land line company is also the cell company - albeit a different service product line.)
Flash back over ten years ago. I was one of the few in college who had wasted my money for a cell phone - it was a pay as you go and I used it rarely - especially considering how lame the CDMA coverage was for the time. I've since moved on to other cell carriers (thanks to the introduction of LNP) and have been much happier with each cell carrier I move to, moved to, and moved again to. The introduction of LNP has had a double side effect - it has forced carriers to be more attentive to existing customers, since they can take there phone number with them to another carrier - and has forced all carriers to be more competitive. Now my neice and neaphew have cell phones - when they get an appartment, why would they get a land line? It's one more number to pass out, it may have another voicemail box to keep track of...
Now look at FaceTime - which just uses the same ports (and arguably protocols) as SIP and STUN, this is the beginning of cell phones running into an analogous funk as land line carriers with the adoption of DSL over Voice service (instead of in conjunction & bundled with them.)
Granted that FaceTime is a closed network (you must have an ios device) but so is skype, etc. the point is that this is the next tipping point.
So I've done some digging and I'm not the first to think of such a process. The nearest posibility is the project for openstack. I still have to do some research, but on the surface it looks like this will do what I'm looking for. That is - a distributed social network. Right now all social networks are closed and there is no way to access friends, post, or share content without joining.
I beleive that openstack will change that. I'll step through the stack and explain the benefits of each layer.
OpenID
Imagine having a single sign on for any resource. This would greatly improve security. How? Imagine all the accounts you have accross the web right now - when ever you want to use a resource (your blog, my blog, a friends blog, yourfavotite singer's website, your bank, your project site, etc) you have some kind of authentication credentials that identify who you are. The defacto standard for identity is your email but not compleltely - your bank may use an account number to identify you. Since email is the most common account identifier, some users may shy away from participation in certain sites just because they don't want there email out there on another site.
Now that you have a unique identifier, it may be common knowledge to what that identifier is, so additionally there is a password to authenticate you. This is where things get sticky since there
Is really no standard. Some sites limit you to a certain length, certain charecter set, and some require a certain password strength. I tend to use a fairly obfuscated password that a number of sites won't allow it because of the charecter set, so I may have to use a simplified password. Additionally, there may be a trust with you and the site - for example my password I use for my bank is nothing like the password for others, where all my social networking sites may have very similar passwords. This brings up another issue since the user may not be aware of how the password is stored in the backend. An intelligent design would use a digest with a site specific seed to ensure that if the site is compromised (by an external attack or a malicious employee,) the passwords would need to be processed against a set of rainbow tables built against that seed. However, you as the end user don't know how the backend was designed, and if the engineer was lazy, the passwords may be plaintext - a very frightening prospect.
So for me, there are a number of sites I want to contribute to but I just don't feel comfortable putting another copy of my credentials out there.
OpenId promisses to change that. The only thing in the specification that is unclear to me is if it can use an in the clear URL (http) or if it always uses a secure URL (https.)
Some one was kind enough to point out that I was still using the default authentication for WP. True, but this installation is a work in progress. I was actually surprised that people (other than my friends) were reading this.
Naboo is our tired chow.
So here I am, trying to figure out some thing... something big... something that will shake the foundation of social networking... so I installed this, in the hope that I can use it as a jump point... it seems really easy and really cool. We'll just have to wait and see.
