You can see my previous posts about social collaboration here and here. In fact, one app that welcomes social collaboration is still running in the wild ... wide open to the public .. with not a single client other than my own in these few weeks. Let's put social collaboration itself aside.
Consider this app:
It lives in the cloud because it is hosted by, say, Google Drive (or Dropbox, or some other) and keeps its output in the same place in the cloud it came from. In order to make it work you need two things:
(1) Solution to the Stringex Problem on which I wrote before, preferably a working software client.
(2) People willing to participate to form the three in the figure in the bottom-up fashion. Note that there are Miners and Mappers.
The problem is that (2) creates security problems. Specifically, people might be afraid to open up their data to public. This fear is not completely ungrounded. Dropbox API, for example, opens your public spaces wide open which means that anyone with the keys can overwrite, erase, add, or do anything with your data. Which is why most such apps limit their scope to the Dropbox account of the user him/herself. You basically write to your own account. On the other hand, Social Apps NEED to share their public spaces.
Still can be done. As long as you provide a separate PRIVATE space which no one can touch and develop a SMART SYNC. The smartness of the sync should be judged the same as Wikipedia does it -- it should be much easier to revert malicious changes than to make them.
Open problem which I am currently trying to close...
