Twitter definitely, and video function too. Also, geo-tagging, so you could meet up via GPS, [or tag where the coppers are massing and avoid that area!]
I think strong encryption with PGP keys would be more of a necessity!
I think strong encryption with PGP keys would be more of a necessity!
Oh, now that's a neat idea -- though, hrm, the first question that pops to mind is how to go about generating keys for folks who don't have 'em and don't know how to do so. Client-side implementation (e.g. in Javascript) that saves the private half of the keypair in a cookie or a text file? What about people who use more than one machine?
I suspect there's some primitive that would be more useful here than PGP proper; perhaps enochsmiles, sjmurdoch or tshb will pipe up.
The central question here probably is _why_ do you want PGP, or strong encryption?
What is it that the crypto is supposed to provide?
Depending on the answers you'll want completely different solutions: - is it keeping eavesdroppers out before the flashmob happens? Short timespan, go for some sort of session key handling and AES or something like that. - is it keeping eavesdroppers out afterwards as well? This will get tricky, depending on your paranoia levels and the timespans involved. - is it verifying identities? Now we're talking the entire trustweb infrastructure. And here the Javascript key-generation will not do any good.
I'm rather skeptical of the whole notion of the web of trust these days, but yeah, these are all good points. Thus the open "what features are desired?" question to start with.
Facebook during the election had an application where you could sign up to have your status automatically updated every 2 hours to urge people to go vote. 1,745,754 people signed up, and in just under 5 days, sent out 4,919,071 status messages. The largest online rally in history.
I don't have any experience with Facebook/MySpace (programming or even really spending time on their sites), but...
How do you want to contact people? Email, SMS, IM, phone, nearby hackable electronic billboard *grin*...the more options you provide the better your coverage. (Some of us use SMS only as a last resort.)
Geo-based filtering might be useful so that a call to arms for a protest in Podunk doesn't annoy the activists in Artemisia.
Give people an easy way to invite others along who haven't signed up for your alerts.
The first two are pretty easy to solve in software -- any of those contact methods (well, maybe not so much the billboard) are simple enough to implement, and geo-based filtering is solved too. The latter brings us to the "who do you trust" problem.
Uhm, an auto-archival function would be nice. Something that followed all of the participant twitter/Qix/whatever streams during the event and auto-collated it all into a timeline-based "What just happened" page. Assuming a group organizer/moderator, it would also be a good spot to submit links from later blog postings.
Good call. Could be done on the fly using AJAX events pretty trivially, to boot.
And each event could be assigned a unique name to use in tagging, so that folks who register their blog with the app get posts tagged with that tag auto-syndicated (perhaps pending mod approval).
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I think strong encryption with PGP keys would be more of a necessity!
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Oh, now that's a neat idea -- though, hrm, the first question that pops to mind is how to go about generating keys for folks who don't have 'em and don't know how to do so. Client-side implementation (e.g. in Javascript) that saves the private half of the keypair in a cookie or a text file? What about people who use more than one machine?
I suspect there's some primitive that would be more useful here than PGP proper; perhaps enochsmiles, sjmurdoch or tshb will pipe up.
Reply
What is it that the crypto is supposed to provide?
Depending on the answers you'll want completely different solutions:
- is it keeping eavesdroppers out before the flashmob happens? Short timespan, go for some sort of session key handling and AES or something like that.
- is it keeping eavesdroppers out afterwards as well? This will get tricky, depending on your paranoia levels and the timespans involved.
- is it verifying identities? Now we're talking the entire trustweb infrastructure. And here the Javascript key-generation will not do any good.
Reply
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How do you want to contact people? Email, SMS, IM, phone, nearby hackable electronic billboard *grin*...the more options you provide the better your coverage. (Some of us use SMS only as a last resort.)
Geo-based filtering might be useful so that a call to arms for a protest in Podunk doesn't annoy the activists in Artemisia.
Give people an easy way to invite others along who haven't signed up for your alerts.
Reply
Reply
Reply
And each event could be assigned a unique name to use in tagging, so that folks who register their blog with the app get posts tagged with that tag auto-syndicated (perhaps pending mod approval).
Reply
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