Personal Channels


Drummond Reed and I have just release a whitepaper describing how personal clouds can be linked together in a decentralized relationship network to create a sharing architecture that has tremendous power and extraordinary benefits.

Every personal channel is controlled by a link contract

I've been writing for some time about personal clouds, lightweight, cloud-based virtual computers that are controlled by and work on behalf of an individual. Personal clouds work together in a relationship network formed by channels that link cloud-to-cloud. These channels, that we call personal channels, simplify, automate, filter, and protect communications in ways that have never been possible before. Drummond Reed and I have written a white paper describing the extraordinary benefits of personal channels over today's email systems and social networks. The paper describes ten benefits of personal channels.

Personal channels are a multi-channel communications and sharing architecture like social networks, but are decentralized and protocol-based like email. Computer systems often begin as centralized systems because such architectures are easier to build and understand. After a time, they evolve to decentralized systems as the limitations of the centralized solution become apparent.

The evolution of communications

This matrix shows how architecture (centralized vs decentralized) and channel type (single channel vs. multi-channel) combine to create different systems. The whitepaper discusses the fact that email, a single-channel communications model, moved from a centralized to a decentralized architecture via a protocol (SMTP), creating a much richer communications platform. Similarly, we describe how multi-channel relationship systems will undergo a similar transformation as we determine how best to support protocols that provide rich sharing environments.