Welcome to the home of the InterTubes protocol.

I'm Mike, and I'm building this site to help develop and promote a new way of sharing things, which is not necessarily internet centric. I chose the name InterTubes because of it's ability to be searched for and found easily.

This page is a stopgap while I flesh out more details of this concept.

I want to introduce some new labels for things you already have, as a way to help organize them into new structures to enable more productive use of the communications capabilities of the internet and also local area networks.

A TUBE is a container for a collection of items. Each tube has a unique ID (a UUID), and a home (a canonical URL). What you put in the tube is entirely up to you, it could be a stream of short messages, text files, photos, videos, or entire file-systems. What's important is that the tube serves as a container with explicit rules for reading and writing. These rules are expressed as capability tokens, which can be delegated by copy.

Integral to the tube is a cryptographic hash of each of its items to prevent degradation in transit or storage. Optional features are open for discussion.

A Tube Capability Token allows the holder a specific type access to the contents of a tube. Various types of access include read, write, append, delete, count, etc.

A CONNECTOR allows for the replication and transport of items between tubes. For instance, it might be useful to have a stream of low resolution thumbnails generated automatically from a Tube of photos.

METADATA is information about an item, it could be notes, copyright information, or anything relevant to the item. Because each item in every tube is uniquely addressable, it is expected that synchronizing of this meta-data would occur across all copies and derivatives of a Tube.