An idea

[sobrique]

OK, so what if there was a portable 'thing' that incorporates the basics of a wireless router, and a lightweight webserver?

A portable module, that allowed someone to ... more or less carry their 'profile' with them, but also act as a more flexible peer to peer communication relay - and ideally each of these ... well, thingies should be able to latch onto a 'real' netlink, to serve as a gateway.

You'd end up with something not entirely dissimilar to the early internet, albeit with somewhat less static routes across it, and allow you to ... well, share much of the same things as people are sharing via stuff like twitter and blogs and stuff, but in a proximity oriented domain. Maybe you share some artwork with everyone in the room, or some kind of informational content - perhaps you do this with GPS co-ordinates and a static 'emplacement' that's tagged with a full entry about that picture on the wall.

Oh, and you'd get more flexibility in net access, as you'd be building a daisy-chain of sorts to the nearest public hotspot. Ideally though, you'd have to incorporate something a little more ... tolerant of outage. But hey, once upon at time, stuff like email was a store and forward protocol - mail servers would relay to each other as and when they could, because 'being online' required a modem and a phone line.

Is this awesome?

Comments

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

there's issues, but I can't see how having your e.g. facebook page on a portable is any more of a privacy violation than having it on facebook itself.
Well, barring I guess that you'd _know_ that that person next to you had that information in the public domain.

[syntheticbrain.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more of the fact that (since people will have photos on these) that you know so and so over there has just split up and belongs to the "loadsa money bank" network.

It makes managing your public face way more important when people can attack you in person instead of by email...