Bittorrent Chat For Social Networking

[joebush]

About 6 months ago I posted here with the idea of a decentralized, secure mail/chat client. (http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/22678-bittorrent-mail-secure-distributed-mailmessaging/) Since then, Bittorrent has made a statement about Bittorrent Chat (Bleep), which I'm sure has excited a lot of people that are concerned with the state of privacy in today's digital world.

 

I've been thinking about an expansion to Bleep which I feel is a natural next step, and definitely important for the same reason that many feel that chat and mail should be decentralized. You can read my post about it here for a layman's argument and description: http://techrace.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/decentralizing-social-media/

 

Bittorrent Chat for Social Networking 

 

Starting with the assumption that social networking is merely an expansion of a multi-user chat system, and based on the information that has been provided by Bittorrent about the Bleep client they are working on, I suggest the following.

 

• Each chat session has a unique identifier. (stated by Bittorrent)
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• Allow for multi-user chat, with each user being identified by their public key, and each participant adding messages using the chat identifier and their private key.
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• Expand each chat session in such a way that it requires a header text, with optional media attachments. This header will be the original post which is 'owned' by the creator, and further replies from recipients are added as comments.
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• When starting a chat (referred to as post after this), recipients are chosen from the creators contact list. The post will be sent to the recipients based on their public keys using the underlying chat communication protocol.
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• Recipients' clients will receive the post from the original sender, or any other recipients that have already received the post.
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• Recipients of the post will share any comments with other recipients with access to the post based on the public keys in the recipient list.
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• When a user opens a contact from their contact list, a page is opened with a consolidated list of the posts the contact has created and shared with the user.

There are many aspects of a final solution that I've ignored, since the idea here is to try to define the basic functionality for social networking to be implemented using Bleep.

I hope the Bleep team sees this post and thinks it's a useful, natural extension to what they're already working on.