bubbles

Decentralized system where user owns the data

The idea

• Every user has a set of bubbles.
• Each bubble is a sort of folders of data
• Bubbles can be shared, public or private

Use case

• I have a TODO list app and I want to switch to an awesome one. With bubbles, instead of rewriting every TODO, I can just link my bubble to the new one
• Enrico is a doctor and he has a software for managing his patients and a software for doing a medical special treatment. With bubbles, he can plug his "Patients" bubble in both, to have the data syncronized and linked
• Nicola wants to find what is the best cycle path to do today. With bubbles, he logs into amazingcyclepath.com by connecting his "Health" bubble, without providing any further information.
• The microwave wants to know what is in the fridge. With bubbles, the microwave checks in the fridge bubbles, what is there.

The outcomes

In essence, we achieve:

• data portability
• data interoperability
• separation between data and applications
• user has control on its data

History

This idea was in my mind, from back in 2012. I wanted to make a new web made of these containers of data, where users could just plug their data as their identity when logging in into websites. I implemented a version that was based on RESTful apis, and everything was centralized.

I slowly got to understand that such system would only work if data in a bubble is standardized, so that data from a bubbles could be read from different applications. The power of bubbles is just here: decoupling applications from data.

It was clear that at that stage, I should have not made a centalized system, where users can host their bubbles wherever they want. I am now at MIT working on Solid/Linked Data Platform - which is in essence a very similar concept. The next step, however, it is not in the standardization of the data or a decentralized protocol for sharing data, but a p2p system for which data do not need to pass through the Internet.

Notes on the current implementation

I will implement bubbles with solid and eventually webrtc and ipfs

Adventurers

I am looking for new adventurers, feel free to ping me or PR me