For the “hosting-is-a-pain” category I’ve decided to take a multi-prong approach. The basic personal package is pure LAMP and about the same as hosting a WordPress blog. Millions of people are capable of handling WordPress. Many are geeks, but we need early adopters.

OneSocialWeb is Java, and Diaspora is ruby. These are going to be harder to deploy in a big way.

The second tier is a multi-user server which can run families and clubs and small organisations. It will probably be setup by a geek or IT department – but requires zero administration (unlike, say Drupal). Set it and forget it.

The third tier is what I call the RockStar server. The celebrities of the world are getting tired of Twitter being overloaded – and stuck with 140 characters. They can’t use Facebook without being swarmed by idiots. The RockStar server will support millions of fans. And you can keep up with close friends and family at the same time – partitioning the fans outside your inner circle the same way it happens in real life.

To pull this off, I needed to also define “what is a friend” in a totally different way than we’ve been doing it online the last ten years. One must accept that friendship is not binary. It is a spectrum, and might be seen differently by each of the parties involved. They need to be able to fully express and put limits on these relationships in their social network, just as they do in real life.

Most of the “open stack” protocols won’t work when you try and implement these kinds of relationships. I’ve basically designed a secure protocol for introducing/linking two people into whatever relationship is comfortable with each, and a secure channel for communicating in either direction with a single sign-on to your own server. You can put any kind of information in this channel.