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Comment by danfang | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys! Thanks for checking out my little project.

Some background info: I was reflecting the other day on just how proprietary our online information seems. Maybe not proprietary, but definitely disjointed. We go to Twitter for social blurbs and trends, we go to Facebook to see our friends, Pinterest to see our interests, Github to see our code, etc etc.

I thought there was a big gap in getting access control to this information and that there are extremely powerful ways we can leverage all of this information. This essentially bootstraps the entire process of going through each social network's API and puts it in your hands. I think some interesting interfaces could come out of such an idea, although I'm not sure how well my implementation has allowed for that.

All in all, please give your feedback. I want to know areas where this is lacking, where you might see hidden opportunities - any reflection is appreciated!

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This is awesome. I started working on something very similar about a year and a half ago (but of course dropped the ball on it) that was based on oauth2.0 but followed a model somewhat reverse of what we are used to. It setup the user as the oauth provider so they could control the permissions when authenticating with a "social service". The social service would request what permissions it required from you and then retrieve the information you allowed it. It would also be required that any information that you publish to the site be published back to your repository. ie. you post an image to Instagram (assuming Instagram would ever implement this) and Instagram would also save it to your repository.

It was a bit overreaching and ultimately why I dropped it. I was struggling with the looming "adoption" issues of how do I get a social service to implement this. But if it was combined with something like this, that piggybacks on the way things are today adoption by users wouldn't require adoption by social services and change could be pushed for more gradually.

Awesome work. I look forward to setting it up and trying it out.

Very cool space to play around in. You should check out Naveen's personal site (foursquare founder) as he was playing around with something similar for his own data a few years ago:

http://api.naveen.com/

I saw that and was glad that people supported a similar idea. I think this is better though - it opens up that portal for everyone. It also opens it up in a way that people in the open source community can build on it (extra modules that is).

There was also the Locker Project (http://lockerproject.org/), which I was keen to use and contribute to, but it stalled years ago.

Does it work for you?

I'm getting an 'Application Error' on the endpoints

can you give an example where this would be useful besides if you were building a website?

I think getting to be the authority on your information would be awesome. If people hooked into your API instead of vice versa, you rarely have to update your information in more than one place. Address changes, place of work, DOB (?) - maybe these could all be achieved through an API for yourself.

There's a possibility for analytics that pulls data from all sources instead of just once (health analytics, IoT data).

There's a possibility for communication -- instead of email, maybe people could communicate through these endpoints.

All of these are just stubs of ideas, but you have a very good point. The largest use case is probably in visually representing your online data.

perhaps if you wanted to create a hybrid social network? say a user signs up, but all of their content is in one place?

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