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A comment on The Web We Lost. Parent comment

Re:The Web We Lost by jmathai on Thursday December 13, 2012 @05:10PM (#4918410)
> Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.

That's not true. We've been building OpenPhoto for a year and a half to prove that statement wrong.

You can have the ease of use of signing up for a site without giving up control and ownership of your data. It baffles me why this model isn't more prevalent since we're proving it works and can be made easy enough for non technical users. We need more people building applications this way. Simply put, it's better.

For those unfamiliar with OpenPhoto you can get more information at http://theopenphotoproject.org but the highlights are:

* open source (https://github.com/photo)

* hosted or self installed

* web and mobile apps that work with hosted and self hosted instances (also open source)

* users select where their files are stored (dropbox, box, s3, cx, dreamhost, etc. -- google drive, sky drive coming soon)

* users import photos from 3rd party services

* users are free to migrate from one storage provider to another (we make it a single click)

* urls are properly name spaced so they're true permalinks if you map a TLD to your site

* i could go on forever....but if you're interested head over to https://openphoto.me

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Re:The Web We Lost by smacktoward on Thursday December 13, 2012 @05:16PM (#4918439)
I was very careful to say the hosted services make you give up a lot of things rather than you have to give up a lot of things, because it's not necessarily true that you must lose those things to get the easier experience. The services just want you to, because it makes life simpler for them technically (reliable interop is hard) and gives them extra ways to make money off you.
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Re:The Web We Lost by jmathai on Thursday December 13, 2012 @05:24PM (#4918481)
I agree. It's sort of sad that we're in the state we're at because it's "harder" to build and "harder" to monetize. But given that; I don't see it changing anytime soon.
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