educe

Open Source “cloud”

I have been watching Thomas Hawk on Friendfeed publish his pictures (same albums) in Flickr and Zooomr and it gives me an idea. Why not have an open source cloud storage for different media (like photos, videos) and provide the publicly shared media as a web service and let the different photo / media sharing site render them in their own way and let the people choose which service they like and use it. In cases like Thomas make it available in multiple places to reach out to a bigger audience.

I know what you might say next. What business sense does this make? Well, to begin with most of the photo sharing sites (let’s talk just photo sharing in this example) offers free storage and social networking (a basic version of course) in their tool. But each has a differentiating factor in the way the content is presented and in the way they offer social networking. People throng to different sites simply because the features suits their personality or convenience. But there are tons of people who would like to reach out to a broader audience and end up posting their pictures on multiple locations. Now this is a waste of resource and inconvenience. If we could make data available as an open source format and simply build tools around it and the USP itself will be around how efficiently you build those interfaces and how effectively you market them and use them as a revenue generating source - advertising for example.

I am not sure if such a thing already exists but I think it is not a bad idea.

Let me know what YOU think…