You should be able to take your content with you when you leave Facebook, Twitter, etc. and share it in the new app-of-the-moment.

Dave Winer has been on this kick about a "storage service" Break the logjam with a simple API and Storage and Firefox.

He says that once we have storage service API’s for Dropbox, et al, that JavaScript apps will become a new web or at least a new way for us to publish blogs and social media.

I really agree because this fits with the SoLiD and PODS (Personal Online Data Stores) concepts of Tim Berners-Lee.

  • You own your content.

  • You publish your Tweet or blog post to your storage service.

  • You authorize Twitter or Medium to access your posts there.

This allows you to publish once and distribute everywhere.

When you get tired of Dropbox, you can move all your content over to Google Drive or whatever and all your posts and Tweets are still online.

JavaScript in the browser

Static web apps work in GitHub and Dropbox where you host some HTML and use JavaScript to read/write content. I’m storing my content in JSON.

Ideally the HTML and JavaScript would become an app as a browser plugin or extension.

Since GitHub and Dropbox already have API’s it seems like this would be pretty simple. So far I’m struggling because almost all code I find is based on hosting it on some web server. The API’s all require someone with a developer mindset to get API keys and tokens.

I still need to answer more questions about how an average user would hook up a JavaScript app to a storage service with just their username and password.

Continue the public discussion

I hope this continues the discussion to conceptualize where this could go.

What kinds of applications do you imagine? Public apps like social networking, blogging, federated wiki. Private apps for tracking your collections of books and movies, address book for contacts…​

Please blog about your concepts and Tweet about it.

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