nikhildahake

Okay, thanks. Let me see how I can fix this.

Hmmm -- is the wording not enough -- that the data is going to stay on google drive?

Do you have any suggestions on how this should be put forth to the user?

@JakeAl -- For P2P to work, both the peers will have to be online to serve the stored files. Say there are 2 computers on the network A and B. If A is accessing the files on B and B goes down, A will not be able to access photos of B.

So, P2P for social networking won't work. For it to really work, a lot of nodes on the network will have to be online and the data will have to be stored on multiple nodes for the purpose redundancy. Imagine your photos being stored all over the web on someone's personal computer!

Let's say you are sharing pictures with your friends and you want them to access those pictures even when your computer is offline. That would mean that those pictures need to be stored on a server from where they can be served. So, we can rule out your computer.

How do you propose that we store the data in this case? I can only think of storing it on some server in an encrypted form. Your thoughts?

How else do you propose to own your data? What if I encrypt the data before storing on Google drive and decrypt it after fetching from google drive?

To answer your question: Right now, the storage is provided by them. So, I don't need to worry about paying for a user's storage. It is on google. And as stated above, data can always be encrypted before storing.

How else do you propose to own your data? What if I encrypt the data before storing on Google drive and decrypt it after fetching from google drive?

Your data is pretty much all over the internet anyway. On HN news servers, your mail servers, etc etc. So, how do you decide who to trust and who not to?

Would people be interested in a social network that allows them to own their data? I built a prototype. Check it out here: https://www.timelines.co

=Timelines -- A social network that allows you to own your data.

=Share beautiful moments of your life with friends, family or the world.

=Easily customize who sees which post.

=Maintain ownership of your data at all times. Timelines stores your data in a specific folder on your Google Drive which is sandboxed from all your other data on Google drive.

=You'll need a Google account to use Timelines!

What do you guys think?

Thanks for the encouragement!

These are really good suggestions. I'll keep them in mind. Thanks!

It is in a sand boxed environment on Google drive. This is more of a proof of concept. I could potentially develop this further by:

1)Giving the user an option of where they would want to store the data e.g. S3, box, dropbox etc. 2)Encrypt the data before sending it to google servers.

Why would this be sarcasm? I don't understand.

I created Timelines - a social network that allows people to own their data.

Timelines stores your data in a specific folder on your Google Drive which is sandboxed from all your other data on Google drive.

Check it out!

https://www.timelines.co

Any thoughts on how I can prove this?