Digi.me has an iOS app that can connect to my bank accounts, social media accounts, Spotify, and activity data. It allows me to easily explore all of my data in one place.
I’m surprised not to see something similar for Solid. Is there a reason for this? I’m interested in building one… but I’m not a developer.
I think it is because the community here is not all that big, and there’s only so much we can be involved in. There’s not much community-building focus within the project, unfortunately. Maybe on the commercial side these things are well underway to being developed, idk. They are perfect use cases indeed, after all.
Maybe we need some leadership to organize an effort around some specific projects. It looks like there are lots of great tools (or parts of tools) that, if just brought together in the right way, would make so many things possible.
In my non-professional opinion, if we can make it easy for individuals to get a Pod and connect their data sources - we create a massive opportunity.
At that point, businesses and apps can really begin to use Pods and benefit from their value.
Does anyone want to work on building a new and improved user experience? I’m already working with a small team to build the UI, but I need some help to build it with Solid. Would love to build a team around this.
So you work at Humane Tech? Have I mentioned that I loved The Social Dilemma? I truly believe that an internet built on Solid (or similar) is the only way out of this mess.
Not exactly. I founded the Humane Tech Community on the forum of The Center for Humane Technology when the founders didn’t have time for the community. All-volunteering and have been facilitating for 3 years now. Though I have been in contact with Tristan Harris et al several times, the HTC community is fully independent of the Center.
I know I am replying to an old post of yours (am very new to Solid), but wondering if there has been any substantial progress in building an easy-to-use UI so individuals can begin connecting their data sources. Most of the discussions seem to be highly tecnnical in nature, but wondering if there is a team to help put all of the pieces to gether so a lot more people start using it.
There’s been some major changes to the spec that haven’t settled down yet, including regarding authentication and data interoperability.
A remaining issue is the selection of vocabularies to model these data sources, i.e. there’s still a fair bit of technical work required, and any UI implementation still needs to be ready to reimplement the non-user facing side as this evolves.
But technically speaking there’s nothing stopping a well versioned, modularised code base from developing, and the Solid Data Browser and OS is a step in this direction GitHub - solid/solidos: The operating system for Solid
I am also interested in any progress about this idea. I am really new to Solid but quite excited about the project and potential outcomes.
I have been following the recent evolution about data unions and I see a strong potential for Solid there. At the moment, these initiatives such as Swash generate tremendous amount of data but these datasets are working in silos and then missing opportunities. For instance, if I join swash data union and one collecting my health data from my healthkit in case of an iPhone (e.g. heartbeat, daily distance, etc.), these data unions as separate entities won’t mutualise the user’s data and then miss an opportunity to make their datasets more valuable for potential data beneficiaries (some user research companies could be interesting in joining my health metrics with some of my web behaviour). As part of the revenue is shared with the users, this results in an opportunity loss for them. Consequently, I see an opportunity for Solid pods to be an additional layer in the data flow of data unions. This would result in driving more value to the users.
On top of data monetisation through data unions, opening my pod’s data paves the way to plenty other opportunities like an enhanced UX on the web. We could imagine some incentives to prompt users to share what their purchase intents are (browsing history could predict it), what their size and gender is in case of an e-commerce website, etc… in order to personalise the commercial offer (if I have a garden, I might be willing to share this information with a furniture website so garden furnitures are properly highlighted). Related to web tracking, I come over this very promising PoC btw. Maybe we are not that far away from what I just envisioned.
If anyone is up for chatting about centralising personal data on Solid pod and how to value it, don’t hesitate!
You may all be interested in this project from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2021-09-personal-data-store-research
Very interesting! Thx for sharing @ThisIsMissEm
Integrating several data sources (media, health, finance etc.) was a bit what I envisioned with the exception I was more thinking of a service agnostic app (in bbc case, recommandations are redirecting to the bbc environment) and of a financial incentive for users to share their data with data unions (using solutions such as streamr for instance).
I am still trying to understand why such projects have not blossomed yet. Any ideas? Getting a pod looks to me a great way to make sure my data is not siloed / scattered (and sometimes not available) over many servers.
Also, have you seen any initiatives connecting data pods with data unions? When looking at current data unions, I feel 1. they miss an important step as they don’t really offer control on the data they collect and 2. they often operate on specific data sources.
I’d say it’s really just a case of the ecosystem being very new. The BBC are doing prototypes, and have published info about some; also businesses want to see Solid work for them, so in the case of the BBC providing an integration point to pull in all your media consumption to your pod, well, it makes sense they’d use it for recommendations on their service; but once the data is in your pod any application could use it for the same. That is, more possibilities get unlocked the more data that exists in pods & people using pods, adoption takes time.
There is or was also MediaKraken in a similar space, that was providing local playback.