After Freetalk and WoT are ready, and a few other WoT-based apps, what will/should Freenet look like?
As I see it, there are several broad categories, ideas that are important within the UI: ======================================================= FRIENDS: Visible Friends = friends = darknet peers This will probably have some traceable chat and basic filesharing. We probably don't have access to friends of friends, or only on a limited level, so no deep social networking functionality here. Invisible Friends = Web of Trust Each user has a profile, this links to various Applications - blog, chat, etc. We have full access (in most cases) to friends of friends of friends of friends, and trust levels between them. We can have any number of Invisible Identities, but only one can be logged in at any given time. This will be used for all the various social applications. APPLICATIONS: Some applications are social, some are non-social, some are both. Browsing Fproxy is non-social, but some websites (e.g. flogs) will inline Freetalk etc. Searching will long-term have social aspects - distributed WoT-based search. So it is sensitive to your WoT preferences, and you may have your own search index, which you can add existing content to, upload stuff to be auto-added once done, link to other people's indexes, merge stuff from other people's indexes, etc. Posting your flog is social: it is linked to an identity. Forums Better name than Discussion? Surely everyone has seen phpbb by now? Non-realtime chat. Social. Chat Realtime chat. Social. Could conceivably be with both visible and invisible friends, even with bridging the two, but most likely purely Invisible Friends for now. Filesharing Downloads and Uploads are currently non-social, but are of little use without a way to announce the content. Uploads should primarily be started from within the flog tool or Freetalk. Downloads however can come from anywhere - but it would be good to remember where they did come from? Basic filesharing with Visible Friends is already implemented but is non-persistent and so unreliable, ljb's plan was to integrate it on the downloads and uploads page (while not necessarily being able to initiate transfers from there). ======================================================= So how does this affect the user interface? IMHO it should make a significant impact. Firstly, creating an anonymous identity is important for most social applications. We should have a global property of the currently logged in Anonymous Identity. We probably want a page with such identities where you can delete one, create a new one, etc. We might want to have a passworded login as an option, configured during setup, but many users will find a dropdown more convenient. We probably want to offer to create one during setup. The logged-in identity, if any, should probably be displayed in the status bar, with a link to the Invisible Identities page so we can log out, create a new one, etc. If we are logged out we should have a link indicating this. The menu bar is already pushing it width-wise with WoT, Freetalk and Freereader, especially as some languages are twice the width of English... It is important to make all available functionality obvious to a newbie, on the home page. This will be much more than just search and indexes... We might want icons for each function or something? Search does need to be prominent though... We probably want menus to roughly correspond to the above categories, plus whatever is essential for settings and status? Search - top level is a search box Forums - top level is a board list Chat - top level is a channel list Mail - top level is an inbox Profile / My Stuff / Anonymous Identities - top level is a list of social apps for which we publish anything, so my blog, my search index, etc, plus my anonymous friends (= WoT trust settings = OwnIdentity profile page), and their friends (= profile page for a KnownIdentity) Darknet - IMHO there is an argument for reintroducing the jargon, given we have *two separate social networks* in Freenet, it is probably less confusing! If we are not to use "Darknet", we could use "Friends", but we need to be careful not to use the term in the previous section, "Web of Trust" is definitely jargon, but is definitely a social network. Status - probably including Downloads and Uploads, which are really status pages, on their own they are NOT any kind of filesharing Files - only if we decide to NOT include Downloads and Uploads in Status. They are clearly NOT Filesharing, because there is no search, they are always initiated elsewhere. But you can change things, it's not really status. And maybe we don't want to totally marginalise anonymous - as opposed to pseudonymous - uploads (i.e. when you just upload something and later announce the key out of band). Settings - rename Configuration, make it a bit shorter :) Justifications: I'm not sure how useful a Browse category is: Most users will want to search rather than use the initial indexes, and search can legitimately return either files or pages. We could use it for just uploading stuff, but that doesn't seem to work too well either... We could then have a home-page as well, with the bookmarks, links to the main features, and maybe messages, which could include RSS feeds including freenet updates, as has been suggested recently, as well as status updates, bookmark updates etc.
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [email protected] http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
