0.01 Nxt would still be a high fee for messaging though... I would recommend a fee of about 0.0001 Nxt per message, if the only thing being sent is a message, the catch is you can only pay that low of a fee if the message is automatically deleted from the blockchain.
I think the messages need to be perceived as being really cheap as we are competing against WhatsApp that offers messaging for 99 cents per year. The average teen sends 3,339 txts per month!! (
http://mashable.com/2010/10/14/nielsen-texting-stats/) This would be about 40,000 txts per year. Assuming he/she uses WhatsApp, that costs $0.99 per year, that works out to be $0.000025/txt Assuming Nxt will soon reach 10 cents that would be a fee of 0.00025 Nxt to compete with them on price alone, we also offer encryption but I'd say we really should try to compete when it comes to price as well. Because if we do it right, I do feel like this could be a killer app because we could probably even compete well with them price-wise. The money made off of this could then compensate for even lower transaction fees and the forgers could be profitable.
And I worked through all the math but just deleted it to avoid clutter, I believe that we could even afford to charge lower than this assuming we delete messages once the app on the other end receives it, after all most text messages will be stored by the local apps on both sides and the blockchain/decentralized storage can be temporary.. only a few seconds in most cases. Forgers supporting the text messaging would have to be paid for their extra bandwidth though.
Regard facebook built on top of Nxt.. actually I see some sense to that, we can afford to charge people a very low fee per post, that varies based on how long they want to store it, store it using the decentralized storage, the people in charge of make money off of that and use that money to advertise itself and grow a business. Why would people use it? Same advantage Dispora has, Diaspora is indeed very similar but I see it being hard to advertise itself, build it into Nxt and I know I would sign up for a Nxtbook account!
Price isn't everything. I don't know anything about "WhatsApp", however as a long-time irc user, that $0.99/yr sounds rather steep for something I havn't been paying at all for for many years, so they must have some other draw considering they aren't competitive price-wise. I would consider endpoint-endpoint encryption a must, and that would be one of your draws imo.
The problem with full-blown nxtbook though is that people don't want to just post text, they post pictures, videos, etc, and you just can't store all that in the blockchain, even on a temporary basis.
WhatsAppNot everything, true but it's a part of it. I agree that encryption will be a big advantage of it.
WhatsApp also offers the ability to form group, sort of like a chat room, I image (haven't used it myself) as well as send image, video, and audio clips. They intend to start offering phone calls, which would be tricky in a decentralized system, I think you'd have to assign individual computers to handle the call and include everyone who's on the line, if that computer drops out, then you reconnect. Would be an interesting feature to eventually offer. Point is though, there are cheap options out there and we do need to compete price-wise, we should approach it from the point of view of what is the minimal amount we need to charge to ensure that forgers to break even, add a little to make them profitable, and charge that much. 0.01Nxt seems arbitrary.
NxtBookActually not true about nxtbook, you will be able to store that much info eventually using Nxt's decentralized storage, basic idea is you pay people for storage space and then you store your data across multiple harddrives, so that if any one of them goes down, others are holding onto it and if someone goes down, you copy it to another machine from one of the ones still there. So the idea is that you only need to store it on 3 or 4 machines at a time and you'd paid to keep it online. The more you are willing to pay per byte, the more machines and therefore security we can offer.
Similiar to multi-sigs you wouldn't have to store the entire data on every machine, just enough so that 2 out of 5 machines could reconstruct it or whatever.
If people hook up 2 or 3 TB drives and allow Nxt to use them for the decentralized storage system and get paid for them, they could make money off of the process and we'd end up with a lot of available storage space.
This could be used to host such images and will eventually be implemented. It would also allow us to provide an email service and store encrypted emails in a distributed manner, so google can't read your emails for example. I think that decentralized storage should be a big priority once asset and decentralized exchanges are finished. Especially because once we have decentralized storage working, then we can create the distributed computing option, and Nxt will become a supercomputer running across multiple forging machines.