Saturday, October 10, 2009

A User provided dowload service standard?

I have an idea, which I'll attempt to express in enough words to get the point across, hopefully to someone who can actually implement it.

The idea is simple... a shopping cart/download list service, with some optional social networking tools.

We often need to download some items from the internet, and sometimes later refer to them. When you deal with multiple computers, you often find yourself having to move files around, and/or re-download them multiple times for various installs, patches, etc.

What if we could do the equivalent of a shopping cart functionality, which is provided/provisioned by the USER. This would have some advantages to trade for added complexity:
  • All downloads would get tracked in one place, per user, instead of per PC
  • All downloads would happen across very high speed links (assuming a hosted service)
  • Virus scanning could be built in
  • Tagging and other forms of metadata could be added
  • Source metadata could be automatically saved
  • Registration data could be supplied via OpenID, or some other means, instead of filling out the same lead data over and over.
  • Lower friction providing lead data might increase the quantity and quality provided to the site allowing downloads
  • Rating and other social networking features could be added as well.
I'm sure that it's non-trivial to set this type of thing up... and a standard needs to be in place, with a canonical example. Who is interested in taking this ball forward?

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