Decentralize to solve the myspace spam problem?
Just recently got onto myspace, am seeing benefits as well as the obvious issues. The most significant downside, it seems to me, is the centralization of it all on one server farm, one platform, one database. Mightn't it be better to do this using a more distributed technology? Perhaps a way to squirt enough webapp code (could be multilingual, Perl and PHP and server-side Java and Ruby and anything else that can support the APIs) onto three or four different major web-server architectures, to allow us to weld our own $10/month web spaces on tens of thousands of different servers, into one coherent whole which we all independently control most carefully for our own benefit and the benefit of all. And then when we have such a distributed setup, all of us participating make money exactly the way myspace does, to the limit of the capacity of the web space we are either renting or owning.
This would be not entirely unlike IRC in distributed nature, but myspace-like instead in utility, and using unspecialized hardware and software, both rented space and owned servers, with real income-production potential. In other words, the first distributed, non-monolithic, Web 2.0 project.
Anyone care to try?
J.E.B.