It’s a good day today to tell something about GMaybe? and who’s behind this.

b: “It’s sunday, and out there there’s a sunny Paris, and i’m waiting for my bike’s paint to dry up. Then, sitting on my sofa, i’m thinking about what’s GMaybe for me and for my workamte, why this exists and how far we want to go in this project.

I love playing. I love to dare myself, and I love to dare the others too, to see how far you can push doing not ordinary things.
I come from the italian hacker scene, and i assisted and been part of the born of important projects, and development too (I’m gonna provide a list here, ’cause I found them so boring, specially when they aim to let you shine and show how beautiful, clever and smart you are).
Most of these projects, they stroke my fantasy because i found them so appropriate by the time they were developped: networking, sharing, multimedia, all of them are concepts and practices that i made mine just because i gave my two cents to them, and they were completely in-time projects with what was happening in the rest of Europe, and for what i’ve known, in the rest of the world.

Luckily my selfish spirit let me detach myself in time and leave those games quite soon. I did define games’ duration, while in those who weren’t completely mine, I succeeded into leaving when i felt it was ok for me.

So a commonsense in all of these adventures was a ethical value: who, when, who, how, why… those were the questions I face myself with.
I think that our proper integrity has to be safeguarded over all the other things.
That said, then i have an interior spring that, sometimes, bring me to question myself: “Why not?”. It’s ok to consider yourself seriously, but not always, not for everything.

And i asked myself the question “Why not?” while the idea about GMaybe? came to our minds.
I asked that myself because it was ages since i last saw an interesting, provoking, and fynny projects, that started today, and that were developing  and affirming today only.
Now that we have Web 2.0, Web 3.0, data portability, browsers’ battles, social networks, privacy evolution and digital self.

So why don’t we create something funny, stimulating, and provoking at the same time?

I found myself being a free software user, since i was a kid: i was allergic to property sofwware, i got very strange reactions on my skin…
Then open source came, and the reactions came on my skin as well.

I had a phase when i thought: if people cannot use my software, it’s because they’re not worth it.
Then i found that documentation is a friend. And then Graphics! If you create a User Interface, that’s waaaay better.
Then i started talking about usability and accessibility.
Now i want a billion users, and if somebody is not using one of my software is only my fault”.

c: “I always hated hypocrisy. I cannot stand people who’s complaining about  Facebook privacy policy. It doesn’t protect it. That’s it, by design.

I like to disassemble things, to make them look differently, using them differently, find them a new sense.
I like daring people, provoke them. Even in a very very cinical way.

When we got the idea we thought: “Why no?” Who decides what is the decency limit? Watching at this limit bouncing, just like a sea    bowl, i’d say nobody. Or much better this limit has a price, and who pays for that can buy it, get it disappeared, and appear back how and when he likes to, if he likes to.

And I’m bloody lazy, and I think of lazy people: why bother in writing blog posts, status messages, pictures, tests and so?
Don’t you all use e-mail constantly? So get it public.”

So Gmaybe? is all of that: a very young social network, not much known, not really working, but it wants to let people play and let them communicate in a  different way: the voyeur syndrome taken to the edge based on the indecency of public mailboxes.

So if you could read your friend’s mailbox, would you do it? If you could rate, comment, tag it, and maybe suggest to others, would you do it?
Maybe not you directly, but we’re pretty sure a lot of people are looking forward to doing it.

That’s GMaybe? a social network made by public mailboxes.

So being a social network, it behaves like all of them: it lets you create a network of users, share informations, materials, pictures, links, comments, status messages.
While the others put their focus on one person (facebook) of a picture (flickr), here you can share mailboxes.

Is it good or is it bad? We don’t care about that.
What does matter to us is trying a new way of interpreting an old communication mean. A stable and efficient that could change its face and begin being something differelnt.

A public mailbox: a blog in public mailbox disguire, an upside down blog.
Your mailbox is not what you want to pretend, in your inbox, but also what you receive.

Is it good, or is it bad? It’s not true we don’t care, but for sure it’s not our first worry now. We just started playing and we want to sse if its’ true that mailboxes ways of being could change. Surely our users will mych more cinical and they’re going to have a different glance about privacy, and they would like really public.
This a provoking project: we play social network and we offer you something that is against privacy by design. In Italy we are increasing our consciousness about public and private limits.

Here that’s about mockery: we play in wasting this division and in let people understand there’s no difference at all.
It’s all about ecological relationship between people.

Are you willing to open another way of communication? Something between private and public and that constantly bounce around? If so, there’s GMaybe?. The tool is on us, let’s see together if we can get a new way of communicating.

So, that’s GMaybe? A work in progress. Maybe a game, maybe a project, maybe a challenge.
We’re getting you updated about what’s happening here, and we ask you some feedback on what you think about that.

Tags: experiment, hacking, playfulness, Work in progress

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 10:22 pm and is filed under FreeThink, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.