Next year I have to go to FOSDEM. This year's conference going on right now, in Brussels. If you're there and reading this -- say a hello for me. I realize the piece I wrote yesterday about the future of the social web is equally relevant now for FOSDEM. My prescription: carefully start over with a simple peer-to-peer service and build on that foundation. You will have to deal with issues of centralization, and at each point decide how much you're willing to trade off ease of use and performance for decentralization. I think you can go pretty far without stripping the gears of users, but there has to be some amount of centralization, identity and storage, being the two biggies. Please read the piece, it's short, bulleted style, highly opinionated, and based on my experience with systems like the ones they're working on. (Who does he think he is? Just a software developer, working hard for a feature-complete web who thinks we've been stuck in a few ruts for a depressingly long time.)#

Added a note to the storage docs page for wpIdentity, explaining that while most files we serve are private, there are examples of files we manage that are public. It had been a while since I reviewed this page. I also see now that we have to have a way to identify the app that created an object, and for that we'll need a way to identify apps. I knew that was coming sooner or later.#

Feb 4 is the midpoint of winter. Almost half-way home. (Maybe Feb 4 isn't the midpoint of winter. If you feel like exploding in rage, please stay far away from me. Thanks for your attention to this matter and gave a nice day.)#