Destiny

@Zakary I can expand on your 'dingo' example and how cloud computing is relevent even on very nitch blog topics... I currently host about 400 different church websites. Currently they are 400 different installations of wordpress - yeah updating seriously sucks. I am in the process of setting up wordpress-mu and moving all the individual sites to the one codebase - advantage to me is only one codebase to maintain, and no more 400+ updates every time wordpress is updated.

So you ask how that relates to elgg and cloud?

Well it's easy... In talking to quite a few of the church's, which are of all types of denominations, they are all very keen on having a 'master' site where all of their articles/video sermons/calendar events/etc are indexed.

This will allow me to have a master site full of content, searchable amongst all the blogs, featuring those I choose. So if a person wanted to search for all the references to 'healing' by all the church's it would be easy to do. The search results could be separated out by 'denomination/pastor' etc...

This will bring the individual sites much more recognition and may bring people to them that otherwise would never find them.

So, just like your 'dingo' idea, I have 400 totaly unrelated sites, most of whom do not know each other and normally never would. I am then able to network them all together.

Now the cloud part extended.

Wordpress makes it very easy for me to store all of my databases/user files on their networks. I also extended my flash communication server to the amazon ec2/s3 cloud as well so I can handle exponential growth with no hardware overhead costs. It also provides a perfect backup for what I consider 'mission critial data' that being the data of my users who trust me with it.

I'm hoping that someday elgg makes it very easy to adapt itself to the amazon network or similar setups. Until that happens I can't seriously consider using elgg for my customers.

Now I do use hsphere by psoft on all of my servers, which is like mini cloud computing. Meaning I can add database servers/http servers/flash servers/etc.. with a simple click of a button. Hsphere takes care of all the load balancing behind the scenes. I have not yet applied elgg to the hsphere setup, so I have no idea if it will load balance properly under my setup.

Anyhow, sorry for such a long post. Was just trying to get the point across that there is huge need for the cloud computing capability in elgg.

@shawn you missed my point.

My point wasn't in opposition, my point was in selection. In some cases making things flow with great through put is awesome and makes a whole of sense. But, at the same time, not every site is going to work naturally as a source of information for another. So I would want to be selective as an administrator.

Thats why I acknowledged the educational enviroment. There is great natural interest in pooling information from the broadest base possible. I did dingo's and underwater basket weaving in the spirit of how little it would apply inbetween each other. Although, a dingo site might be interested in information dealing with dog breading, pet nutrition, and other things which would be a great wealth of information between sites.

If there is no ability to be selective, you flirt with providing huge amounts of information lacking relevance for your user base and no matter cool the idea is, you alienate people.

I like your idea of having churches working around a hub, but this was about a cloud and not necessarily just a cloud in your own personal control, but potentially a trading of information from my site to yours even though neither you or I put our content out there with expressed intention of working together.

That it would be possible to make this kind of exchange of information would definately be powerfull, but it does need to have to ability to be configured to pull information with purpose.

re; API calls
http://elggucational.ensci.us/

already covered "configure", "hub", "master" site..

didn't y'all read thru...?

no. i was just responding to the discussion. I am not really at the point where I need to think in terms of putting this too use.

Honestly I just want to be a mosquitto

@Zakary I couldn't agree more with what you just said. I see 2 things being very important.

1. Selective input. Meaning I choose the sites I am connected to. Maybe someday having a directory of elgg sites to choose from would be cool.

2. Ability to 'opt out' or not start in the first place. In other words, don't ever make elgg cloud linking to everyone a requirement or you end up with the ning issue. I can't describe how many people I know who run sites on ning who were more than upset that their users were sent emails and auto imported into ning.com a few months back. -Obviously huge difference as ning is propriatary where elgg is open, which is why I'm here in the first place.

you said the N word shhhhhh! horrid nightmares.

Please dont forget the poor lonley user that wants to make a business out of their site. I don't want people friending others on another site, well unless I run it. I want them to register in mine so i can get more revenue. yes greedy dollar signs in my eyes, but don't worry I plan on paying regular homage to the elgg gods.

Now for educational sites it would be a god send of useful information links, heralding back to the very beginings of what Internet really meant.

So yes market your ElggNet in that way and you have the winner!

"ElggNet - what the Internet was intended for" quote Me :D