

Peer-to-Peer, personal web platform: Tonido  - codemechanic
http://www.tonido.com

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eipiman
You mention a business strategy, so presumably you intend Tonido to be a
business. How do you plan to make money?

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codemechanic
Tonido offers personal web applications that run from your desktop without
relying on 3rd party servers.Our business strategy is to position Tonido as an
alternative to online services(cloud) and emphasize privacy, control of data
and online freedom etc. We believe in it too. Is it a right strategy to become
a purple cow and get traction among subset of internet users? If you think we
are wrong what are the alternative strategies that we can employ? Enlighten
us.

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mindslight
I definitely like the idea, but without seeing the platform capabilities and
design goals, I can't get excited. The idea of distributed p2p applications is
simple - seeing the problems you've aimed to solve and how you've solved them
is what would convince me to invest time using/evangelizing/developing your
platform (and open source is a requirement for the latter two).

I'd say that your early adopters are going to be other technical people that
_know_ these kinds of distributed services can be built (otherwise, one
wouldn't see the problem with centralized services), and would share similar
requirements, but I'm clearly biased.

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madhan
Thanks for your input. It is early days and we are trying to make sense of the
direction of how and where we want to take it.

One distributed P2P problem we solved is the synchronization of data. Imagine
N peers operating on data, adding, modifying, deleting... offline or online
and then they synchronize this with each other. This all works seamlessly in
the Tonido Platform. We have API that can be used by any applications to use
this in their apps.

Tonido Workspace uses this stuff to make it work. It is one giant workspace
that people each have their own copy and work on when they want. And
everything gets synced. Tasks, Calendars, Chat, Discussion Forums, Contacts,
Files. You are finally free from servers to babysit interactions.

Similarly, Tonido Photos uses the sync API in a simpler way to synchronize
photo comments, ratings, tags among Tonido Group members.

~~~
mindslight
A distributed filesystem is certainly the way to do this and I like what I'm
hearing, but I'm still curious what the underlying capabilities of that
filesystem is.

Who is authoritative for a given file? Is it a crypographic least-authority
filesystem like freenet or allmydata? Or does each identity basically own a
top-level directory with the others caching what it publishes?

What do identities and the identity server look like? Does the server only
handle pretty name -> crypto key mapping, or is it highly trusted?

~~~
madhan
Actually, we don't base the synchronization system on the fileystem. It is
based on concept of records in a virtual store. A record is a 'syncable'
entity. For example, a task in a Workspace is a record, a file can be a record
and so on.

There is no single authority for a record. It depends upon what the sync
settings are. Say you have a record that two people simultaneously modified,
when the sync happens, the conflict gets resolved based on the setting, which
for instance can the last change wins or the originator wins etc.

Think of Workspace more similar to how Groove works rather than a shared
filesystem.

The Tonido Domain Server (TDS) basically implements a distributed login and
authority system. As you said, it basically stores a pretty name->Crypto key
that can validate a particular peer and help verify the identity in case
another peer is interested.

The identity server's job is to provide Dynamic DNS function so URLs are
resolved as well as to handshake connections between peers. The TDS is
distributed in a sense that you can run your own TDS with your identity
domain(say mindslight.com) if you want to. Your Tonido ID will be then
me@mindslight.com. There is no central system. As long as they all talk the
same simple protocol everything can interoperate.

What we are really hoping to get to is to the point where more TDS exist and
people simply choose which one they want to create an ID on, like email
addresses.

We need to write some more on this in our blog, but these days 24 hours
doesn't seem to be enough. :-)

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codemechanic
We plan to make money by selling the applications as Apple app store. Further,
We can private label our Tonido network and domain server for enterprises.

