Parakey:Sharing Online Becomes Ever Easier Today a recipe isn’t passed on at the Thanksgiving table anymore. It’s communicat

Parakey:Sharing Online Becomes Ever Easier
    We all know people who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers. We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online. Why? Because online is how the world, like it or not, increasingly talks. If my mom can’t do something as basic as share her recipes or photos with her grandchildren online, then she gets left behind. In the 21st century, this sort of information isn’t passed on at the Thanksgiving table anymore. It’s communicated through the Internet.
    Grandparents love seeing their kids and grandkids on Flick, but they’re often too intimidated to put their own pictures on these sites. The reason, in part, is that they have to jump through many hoops:dragging pictures here, uploading them there.
    It’s not just grandparents who aren’t using the Web as much as they could—it’s everyone. The problem is there’s no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service-providers, and applications.
    Our answer to the problem is Parakey, which, inherently (and potentially profitably), is aimed at making it easier for everyone to get their stuff online. Parakey is "a Web operating system that can do everything an operating system can do." It makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source.
    Now, let me show you the "family portal" for a fictional clan named the Andersons. Mom has a page with her recipes displayed. Dad has his collection of war documents. The kids have their party photos. Although it looks like a Web site-down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section—it is, in fact, something much more ambitious:a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera. So instead of clicking between, say, the Windows desktop and a MySpace home page displayed in a Web browser, you are always operating within your Parakey site.
    Take digital photos for example. Here’s how the Parakey experience works:you plug in your camera, and your photos get stored seamlessly on your computer in such a way that you can view them quickly and easily through your Parakey site. No more digging through folders for the right image files. They’re organized and displayed as attractively as a site like Flickr might display them, as thumbnails with identifying text beneath them. Parakey allows for serious editing functions-from cutting and cropping to eliminating red-eye—all within the context of your Parakey page. But it also brings some more basic (and fun)scrapbooking habits into the digital realm. Ross clicks on an icon representing what he calls the Toy Box. Open the Toy Box and there are all sorts of accessories for dressing upthe pictures:word balloons, devil horns, goofy fonts.
    Now let’s say you want to share your collection of graduation photos with some selected family and friends. The problem today is that there are several layers to getting that done. Many sites require users to register before seeing a photo album. With Parakey, you send a digital "key"to people whom you want to be able to access your site. The keys appear as little icons that look like, no surprise, house keys. Each one contains a unique identifier, essentially a password. When a recipient clicks on the key, he or she gets a cookie installed that contains this password—and, as a result, gains access to the stuff you’ve designated on your site.
    Drag, say, a silver key onto a collection, and that action makes it for your eyes only. Drag a gold key, and you open it up to family. A bronze key opens it to friends. Right now if you have photos you want friends but not co-workers to see, and vice versa, you need two different Flicker accounts. And unlike many sites, Parakey doesn’t require your loved ones or chums to register before viewing your photos. And it makes downloading content easier, too. The idea, eventually, is to do away with the file archiving required today. Everything you encounter while surfing online-photos, videos, tunes—you can drag right onto your Parakey page, end of story.
    To use Parakey, you first must download a small application. This is at the heart of the Parakey system. It contains software that essentially turns your computer into a local server. This approach has one huge built-in benefit: you can manage your content quickly and efficiently, even if you’re off-line. Whether you make your changes online or off, there’s only one interface; everything is ultimately stored locally, your computer being synchronized with remote servers whenever you are online.