Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

As a person, I am mostly solution-driven/motivated (I mean that in the least clichéd way possible): what gets me ticking both professionally and personally is solving interesting problems in novel ways. This can be either technical problems, entrepreneurial problems or both, money is kind of a secondary concern: it is the fascination level that counts (that being said: I’d prefer travelling in an Aston Martin to public transport, and currently public transport is what I can afford out of the two..).
This is why I am constantly looking for something new and challenging to solve, it gives me a sense of purpose. But lately, probably in the last year or so, I haven’t really had any interesting challenges and as a consequence I have felt I lacked a bit of personal purpose (I’ve been comfortable, that’s all).

So I was quite happy yesterday when I was reading “Founders at Work” (which I mentioned earler), and the piece about Ray Ozzie (of Lotus Development, Groovy and currently Microsofts Chief Software Architect): his start-up Groovy network was based on the premise of being able to collaborate in a peer-to-peer environment and synchronize data and workspaces seamlessly.

That got me thinking: masterless, peer-to-peer data synchronization, that is an interesting problem!
Apart from certain collaborative applications, various integrations for desktop-to-mobile synchronization etc, I am not aware of any generic, multi-purpose solution in this space, a framework that would seamlessly synchronize data of various types and sources based on implementations plugged into it. Sounds like a pretty interesting area for something, perhaps an open source project?

Now, I’ve only thought about it since yesterday, and only then for a few hours, so I might not be aware of the whole landscape in this area (if anyone is, give me a shout, either in the comments or by e-mail). But I’ll at least do some research on it, and if it looks favourable, I might start doing something, if nothing else for the fun of it.

Yes, I know it borders on “technological self-gratification” to use a less vulgar term, and that most of the tangible business applications to the concept may already be covered by pre-existing products, but hey, a mans got to have his fun, don’t you think?