Comments on: Personal Web Services – The Unnecessary Business http://www.goland.org/noneed/ Technology, Politics, Food, Finance, etc. Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:51:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Administrator http://www.goland.org/noneed/comment-page-1/#comment-18537 Administrator Wed, 16 Aug 2006 01:24:47 +0000 #comment-18537 Given that the power needed by your average headless server is in the range of a lightbulb I don't see power as an issue. As for backing up, you need that in any case for your main machine so the extra load from the zero is effectively zero. As for functionality, I must admit that I'm having trouble coming up with any loss of "social" data by having the specific services I listed in the article served privately. Take an address book as an example. It knows who the owner's friends are and the server itself can trivially aggregate data from those friends and use it for 'friends of friends' functionality. In fact, it can do queries across the friends of friends data that a centralized system could never afford to calculate. As for handling the slashdot effect, there's nothing magical about P2P. If someone is worried about the slashdot effect then by definition they are not serving up private data and therefore the entire article no longer applies. I think the key point here is that I am only talking about services such as the specific list I gave at the start of the article that are inherently private (or very small scale). If data isn't private (which beyond 1 or 2 hops in a friend of friends system, it's not) or isn't small scale then my article doesn't apply. But it turns out, as I believe my list shows, that lots and lots and lots of very interesting and very private data does fit into the examples. Given that the power needed by your average headless server is in the range of a lightbulb I don’t see power as an issue. As for backing up, you need that in any case for your main machine so the extra load from the zero is effectively zero.

As for functionality, I must admit that I’m having trouble coming up with any loss of “social” data by having the specific services I listed in the article served privately.

Take an address book as an example. It knows who the owner’s friends are and the server itself can trivially aggregate data from those friends and use it for ‘friends of friends’ functionality. In fact, it can do queries across the friends of friends data that a centralized system could never afford to calculate.

As for handling the slashdot effect, there’s nothing magical about P2P. If someone is worried about the slashdot effect then by definition they are not serving up private data and therefore the entire article no longer applies.

I think the key point here is that I am only talking about services such as the specific list I gave at the start of the article that are inherently private (or very small scale). If data isn’t private (which beyond 1 or 2 hops in a friend of friends system, it’s not) or isn’t small scale then my article doesn’t apply. But it turns out, as I believe my list shows, that lots and lots and lots of very interesting and very private data does fit into the examples.

]]> By: Julien Couvreur http://www.goland.org/noneed/comment-page-1/#comment-18521 Julien Couvreur Tue, 15 Aug 2006 16:49:55 +0000 #comment-18521 I posted <a href="http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000140.html" rel="nofollow">some thoughts</a> along the same lines. I think that you missed some important trade-offs though. Personal services do get better privacy and more resources per user, but there have downsides: there is a maintenance cost (power, backuping,..) and a functionality cost (it's difficult to aggregate the social data and learn from crowd). Also, you mention that centralized/hosted services can handle the slashdot effect better. I rather think that P2P or hybrid systems (minimal server involvement, large edge caching and computation) would be a better fit. I posted some thoughts along the same lines.
I think that you missed some important trade-offs though. Personal services do get better privacy and more resources per user, but there have downsides: there is a maintenance cost (power, backuping,..) and a functionality cost (it’s difficult to aggregate the social data and learn from crowd).
Also, you mention that centralized/hosted services can handle the slashdot effect better. I rather think that P2P or hybrid systems (minimal server involvement, large edge caching and computation) would be a better fit.

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