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I can't speak for everyone, but please just take my email address. There is no Facebook or Google Plus in my life, and I don't use my old Twitter account. I only keep up with a handful of people--something I can do with email and phone; I don't want to give glorified marketers another tool for spying on me. For me personally, the web is just a means to gain and exchange useful information to aid in my academic life; I like to stay "disconnected", if that makes sense.

Everyone uses the web differently. I understand that other (much larger) demographics have no problem with single sign on and that you can perhaps get to market faster without implementing a dedicated sign up system. I respect that.

I do like "social" (I hate that word) news sites; a tool to help cull non-interest items, prioritize on key interests, and introduce novel information from users who share similar interest graphs would help me out enormously.

I don't want to derail the topic, but has anyone given a thought as to whether aggregation (and distribution and reader functionality) could work in a decentralized, p2p manner? Without relying on a central authority of any kind?

I would love a scaled-down, low-bandwidth bittorrent-type app that delivers news items (with highlighted commentary) to my devices, already wrapped in an readability like interface, collected from among my "interest graph peers". That way, the mining/ML algorithms and processing overhead can be implemented and tweaked by me.



I don't want to derail the topic, but has anyone given a thought as to whether aggregation (and distribution and reader functionality) could work in a decentralized, p2p manner? Without relying on a central authority of any kind?

I think that's Usenet (cue George Santayana's quote).

It doesn't have a centralized authority, it's delivered in machine readable formats (so you can easily process it), it has plenty of readers, etc.




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