PageKite tech preview

By Bjarni Rúnar 2010-09-21, 17:18

After a very busy summer, we are now just about ready to accept some early alpha testers for the PageKite on-line service.

But first, we should probably tell you what it is:

PageKite is technology that allows you to run a personal web server on your own desktop, laptop or mobile phone.

That's all!

Here are some common questions (with answers):

Why is that cool?

Because it puts you in control of your data. You don't have to upload your data to someone else's servers in order to share it with friends or family. It also allows you to make better use of the hardware you already own - why should someone with a fast computer, a broadband Internet connection and lots of hard drive space have to pay extra to use someone else's computer for their website? Also, being able to run a web server on your cell phone is obviously cool. It just is!

Wait, couldn't I do that already?

If you are a big geek, then you probably could! Some of the time. But most of us are stumped by firewalls, routers, IP-addresses, DNS servers and other technicalities. Our solution is designed to tunnel right through those obstacles and configure everything for you - whenever you have an Internet connection, your site is on-line.

But what if I have no Internet access?

Then your site is off-line! We are working on some technical wizardry to give you more control over what exactly happens in this situation, but that stuff isn't ready yet. Obviously, this means you won't want to use PageKite to put your company's website on your mobile phone. That would be silly! On the other hand, if you are using the web to share private, personal data, the ability to easily turn your site off and on at will suddenly becomes an advantage.

What if my computer breaks?

Then your website breaks. You have back-ups, right? If not, we might someday put you in touch with a partner that can help you with that.

What does this have to do with Facebook?

Nothing, really. But the way we see it, PageKite is one piece of the technological puzzle we need to solve before we can have a truly distributed, open social network - a next-generation social network which respects your privacy while allowing you to easily share and communicate with friends, family and everyone else.

Well, what does this have to do with Diaspora?

Still nothing! Diaspora is not ready yet. But Diaspora, like many other projects, aims to be another piece of that social networking puzzle. When it is ready, you may decide you want to run it on your own computer. PageKite will make that possible.

How does it work?

Hopefully, that won't matter so much. It should just work. The experience we are aiming for, is that you buy a domain name for your website (yourname.com or you.pagekite.me) and the name will come bundled with access to the PageKite service and any additional software you need to make use of it.

No, no, how does it work??

The jargon-laden micro-explanation is: PageKite is a network of reverse HTTP- and HTTPS proxies and dynamic DNS-servers, accompanied by software implementing protocols for discovery, tunneling and DNS updates.

You are such geeks!

We know! Hopefully we'll have something a little less technical to show off in a few months. Making things simple is surprisingly hard work! Our goal is still to make the web more privacy friendly for the average person, but we have lots of work to do before that is accomplished. This is just the first step.

All this stuff will get fleshed out and explained in more detail as we make further progress. And yes, the critical bits will be released as free software (open source), once the protocols are stable.

Note that everything is very rough around the edges at the moment, so this should be considered a "technology preview for technical people only". Making something user-friendly is going to take more time.

Help us test it!

If, after this brief introduction, you are interested in trying the system and helping us polish it off, sign up here.

Also, please join the discussion group.

Note that you'll need to be willing and able to both run a web server and a Python program on the machine you use for the tests.

I expect that once we go into "commercial service for sale" mode, anyone who helped out with testing will be offered some amount of free service as a thank-you. :-)

Update October 5: text updated to use our new product name: PageKite.

Update November 9: text updated to direct people to the self-service signup on pagekite.net.