"Okay, those are the ideas we've discussed so far." JD turned towards the couch.
George and Hank nodded, then turned to Ronnie, who also nodded.
Hank took the lead. "Mildred, you trust me as your legal advisor, right?"
Mildred was stoic. "Yes, Hank."
"The house party, with Sheliah's company in charge, is the option presented that is least liable to leave your family vulnerable.
"And as your son's legal advisor, I concur," George added.
Ronnie took her turn. "James, do you have any comments?"
James shook his head.
"Okay, then I'll need to discuss this with the rest of the legal department, but I'm pretty sure that we will be in full agreement with personal counsel."
JD nodded. "Thank you, Ronnie, Geoge, Hank. What do you say, Sherry?"
Sherry looked at Millie, who nodded.
"If your mother can let us do our part, I'm in for the house party. Not in for the other ideas."
"Millie, will you join us too?"
"I fully agree with Sherry. I hope I'm not disappointing you, Sister Zukiger."
Mildred actually seemed to be relaxed. "Maybe I'm seeing some wisdom to this approach."
JD nodded with a frown. "I'm seeing some business opportunities. Sheliah, who's your company's website provider?"
"What? Oh, we're just using something Tiny-algo provides for cheap."
"What would you say to letting our company develop a real SNS for this house party, with an eye to extending it to all your clients later?"
Sherry looked up at JD with a slow grin. "JD and I have often talked about what a proper SNS should look like and what it would take to implement. The most destructive thing to an SNS design is making it too broad in scope -- too big. This would be a near-perfect opportunity to publically demonstrate scope-limited SNS and how it can be integrated into the world-wide network."
She paused, looked around at puzzled faces, and laughed. "Anyway, we've set up some experimental networks, and I think we could put something together quickly that would be useful at this house party. Where's a marker? James, you want to handle the whiteboard with JD?"
James and JD moved over to the whiteboard, and both took markers and started diagramming network services.
The rest of the group looked puzzled.
Sherry explained. "Most of us are on Pigpen, right?"
Nods of agreement.
"Are you satisfied with them?"
Silence.
Mildred spoke up. "They aren't too bad."
"But, permissions problems, unstable, advertising-oriented, hard to manage, manipulative?"
Nods, especially at the last word.
"We can fix a lot of that by having the users host their own news servers. Oh, call them timeline/profile servers. Distributed. So, for the purposes of this house party, say we set up a trial SNS network. Users will have full domain names with mail addresses specifically for use within the SNS."
"I'm lost," George complained.
"What's a typical domain, JD?"
JD wrote on the board:
jdz.epmatch.com.uis"Make it a URL people can access for news," she added.
He wrote,
news://news.jdz.epmatch.com.uis"Looks like a vanity domain," Hank commented.
"Like a vanity domain. Instead of going to Pigpen, this is where people go to see your main profile and current news feed. How about a fan club domain, JD?"
"Not that I want one, but it could look like this:"
news://fans.jdz.epmatch.com.uis"How about an address for fans to write to?"
mail:fanclub@jdz.epmatch.com.uis"Someone to chat with?"
chat:jdz@jdz.epmatch.com.uisMildred shook her head. "I don't get it."
James replied, "Well, mostly it's about making all these domain name thingies meaningful. Give them uniformity, flexibility, and meaning beyond the SNS company's business plan. Especially keep the domains and the servers in the owner's control."
"Okay, it does look more meaningful than those long strings of goobledygook that SNS servers usually serve up." Hank shrugged. "So why doesn't everyone do this?"
"Not invented here syndrome, mostly," Sherry answered. "JD, hold your tongue."
JD gave Sherry a mock glare, then grinned sheepishly.
James took over. "The point is, these two have been spending spare moments working out how to map SNS functionality into standard network functions, and working out the basics of how to implement them distributed across the users' network itself. Sheliah, if you are interested, your company could be a guinea pig, to see how it would work."
"How much does it cost me?"
"Wise question," James answered. "What do you say, Sherry?"
"Software costs are gratis for helping us debug. Hardware, we'll probably want to split costs on, but that's actually one of the features of the approach we've been working on."
JD picked up from his desk a rounded cube of plastic with power plug prongs sticking out of it, and held it up. "Each user has his or her own home server in something like one of these inexpensive wall-warts. These retail for the price of an ordinary day's labor. Backup functions can be provided on-site with another." He held up a second. "And the network services provider can lease out backup services for off-site data security. Distributed SNS with backup. For the house party, we can put one, maybe two of these in each guest room, and we'll back the data up on an on-premises server."
James laughed. "What he means, beyond cost, .... When was the last time you couldn't access Pigpen for several hours?"
Jenny said, "Last month, most of my friends were off-line for half a day."
James grinned. "This way, if you can access the general network, you can access most of the SNS. No depending on Pigpen or Trawler or Tiny-algo or whoever, just on the network itself. JD and Sherry will talk about infrastructure -- proxies and backup servers, domain name servers, network bandwidth and such, but the upshot of it is that the bulk of the load is distributed among the users."
JD put the wall-warts down and went back to the whiteboard. "Something else that current SNS companies get wrong." He started writing Venn diagrams with group names on the board. "A little E-P-ist centric, but ..."
Sherry continued for him. "When you start a new Pigpen account, you have no idea what a friend group is, right?"
There were some murmurs of disagreement and some murmurs of agreement.
"Anyway, it's a pain to manage all your groups."
Everyone nodded.
"We'll set up templates of default groups, to make it easier to figure out, and the groups will have addresses. JD?"
JD wrote example addresses out on the Venn diagrams,
jdz.epmatch.com.uis/friends"Those group addresses aren't, by default, served to the general public-facing web; only the user sees them. It's to help the user sort through what he or she interacts with and not eat up too much time. But they will be easy to make, and some, like friends and family, will be set up by default for general users. Most SNS providers give you contact groups, but our user interface will always ask which group or groups to sort a new friend into, instead of just dumping them all into the default pool."
jdz.epmatch.com.uis/family
jdz.epmatch.com.uis/company
jdz.epmatch.com.uis/clients
jdz.epmatch.com.uis/church
jdz.epmatch.com.uis/club
Millie took a picture and JD erased the first set of default friends and the Venn diagrams.
JD continued. "For this house party, the default groups will be something like this."
joeguest.epmatch.com.uis/friendsSherry added, "So the guests can immediately start using the SNS to try to figure out who he or she wants to hang out with and set lines of communication up. And the user interface makes it easy to move or copy contacts from group to group."
joeguest.epmatch.com.uis/fans
joeguest.epmatch.com.uis/close-friends
joeguest.epmatch.com.uis/allies
joeguest.epmatch.com.uis/watch1
joeguest.epmatch.com.uis/watch2
joeguest.epmatch.com.uis/donotshow
Sheliah and some of the team were nodding their heads in agreement.
"I think I can talk the others at matchmakers into this."
Mildred interrupted. "Well, I'm glad my son is getting some enthusiasm about something, but I'm afraid his enthusiasm is not about finding a wife. I'm afraid I can't approve of this."
"Honey, everyone in this room loves you."
"What's that supposed to mean, Karl?"
"It means, Mom," Krystal jumped off her perch. "You don't have to prove or approve anything." She sat on the arm of JD's big chair and reached around her mother's shoulders and gave her a hug. "You're winning even if you think you're losing."
"What silliness are you talking about?"
"Don't fight my big brother about this, okay, Mom? I promise you he's onto something good. You'll love it."
"But what about my grandchildren?"
"It won't be long until I can do something about that, even if he keeps dragging his feet."
"That's another thing I worry about."
Krystal kissed her mother's cheek.
"Oh, stop."
JD grinned. "Mom, I promise I won't let the tech keep me from giving the women at this house party the attention they deserve."
"They deserve. You always throw conditions into your promises that worry me."
Sheliah said, "Well, I like the idea, both from the business side and for matchmaking for your son. I think you should leave this one up to him."
Since it seemed everyone else in the room was in agreement, Mildred bit her lip. "Well, I guess, if it doesn't take all year."
JD closed his eyes for a moment and silently expressed his gratitude for unseen help.
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Copyright 2019 Joel Matthew Rees
Backed up here: https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2019/05/bk-jdz-millionaire-05.html.
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