Splicious - your network, your data

It's been a very long time since i posted here. Part of the reason is that for the last four years i've been working with increasing intensity on an exciting project. It's been really fun working on splicious and especially fun to think about what it might mean for communications on the Internet; but, until it reached a certain level of maturity, none of us on the project felt we could really talk very publicly about what we were doing.  Now, we feel we're ready to engage.

Splicious is a distributed social communications platform that provides three core benefits

• a simple approach to distributed identity
• a simple approach to searching message and post level content both in realtime and throughout the history of your communications
• integration with popular cryptocurrency, like BitCoin, so that people can directly support content creators and curators

We feel this directly addresses two social trends we have been observing with some alarm.

• Privacy and information flow in internet-based communications has been severely compromised, with corporate and government agencies being able to access and profit by personally identifiable information and no real corresponding transparency on the part of these agencies to balance the situation.
• Capital has been concentrating in such a small sector of society as to virtually cease to perform its principal function: provide a tool whereby we can all take care of each other and the planet.

Knowing that the corporate exchange of personal information (including personally identifiable information) is a >9B$ market, we feel it should be possible to turn the whole model on its head. We put a novel social media UI on the front end of our communications platform. This UI lets people decide for themselves how much that information is worth to them, and using BitCoin, lets them directly support people who provide them with information they find valuable.

We've been running initial user trials and have gotten some very positive feedback. Here's what Vlad Patryshev, ex-Googler and privacy/security guy for Google's first social network, had to say about his experience with splicious. 

Now we're at the most exciting stage of the project. We've invested 4.5 years of our lives into this effort. The collective capital investment exceeds 2M$. Now we need to see if we're on the mark: if there are enough people who feel that there is a problem worth addressing here; and that splicious comes close enough to the mark that a sufficient number are willing to get behind this solution. That's why really we're running a crowd funding campaign on RocketHub. When enough of us come together to work on something we believe in, that's when change happens.

The reason we've structured the ask in the way we have is due to the high quality bar that splicious has to meet. The fact that a user can search all the communications they have access to; and they can send and receive BitCoin as support for sharing content means that users can suffer a much greater risk if the system fails to deliver as promised. This is why we have to roll the service out in a very careful, step-by-step fashion and why we are only allowing 1000 users initially. That's also why we are asking for new crowd funding at each 10-fold increase in the number of users.