With current social networks, you are not the client. You are the product being sold.
The value you create by being a part of the network flows upwards immediately, reaching only a select few: those in control of the network. With Synereo, a completely decentralized and distributed network, you are in control. The value you create stays in your hands.

Synereo is a next-gen social network that puts security, identity, and community management directly under your purview, respecting your attention and rewarding you for your activity on the network.






The beauty of recent developments based on the innovative Bitcoin blockchain technology is that they allow the public to claim control over previously centralized endeavours. By creating automated, trustless interactions over the network, we can now build systems that do not require concentrated power to maintain order. Rather, the power is spread throughout the network and is left in our hands, the active participants in it.

The Bitcoin revolution has brought us control over our money. In this position of control, we are its owners and we decide what to do with it, uninhibited by the interests of those in positions of great influence. Synereo is attempting to do the same, only with the fundamental social tool of the Information Age - the social network.

With current social networks, you are not the client. You are the product being sold - and for huge sums of money that you will never see. These massive corporations maintain extensive databases characterizing your behavior in an attempt to exploit the content that you create and the networks that you build with your friends and family. They’ve tapped into your deeply human need to socialize, with no respect for your privacy or psychological well-being, to turn your life into an endless marketing opportunity.  

Your Identity is valuable. Your

• Curiosity
• Hobbies
• Habits
• Sexuality
• Aspirations
• Relationships

All carry monetary value. Everything you do online is being tracked and monetized for someone else’s financial gain. And while these corporations tap into our most basic of needs, they demonstrate the ability - and, as a publicly traded company, a reason - to adjust their algorithms in a way that affects human behavior on a large scale.

We’re now in a unique position to take this power back from our social networks, to keep the value we create for ourselves, and put it to work for us. By disconnecting the application from its current axiom of generating revenue for its corporate owner, we can move development in the direction of supporting the network and its users. It becomes an ever-evolving social product, shaped to facilitate our need and desire to communicate.

Meet Synereo.






Synereo is a next-gen social network. It is:

• Unconstrained by the financial desires of its operators
• Impossible to take down
• Rewarding for content creators
• As private and as unmonitored as you want it to be
• Devoid of any center of control
• Designed to value your attention through direct compensation
• A better system for social organization online

Your attention is worth money

No more will your time and attention on social networks be monetized by centralized powers. You are the direct beneficiary of the value of your attention. If someone wants it - a politician, a corporation, or your favorite party producer - they pay you directly.

A token with an inherent value




AMPs, Synereo’s content flow currency, serve as a way to Amplify the flow of information in the network. AMPing content increases its ability to propagate to peers and the chances of it being seen by more users. This gives them an inherent market value, as any business or individual wishing to bring information to your attention non-organically has to pay you with AMPs for it.

A next-gen social network

Synereo is built from the bottom-up to maximize the efficiency of the Attention Economy, an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as the scarce commodity, and the flow of attention as critical for organizing and managing a social network. Treating your attention as having an inherent power to influence your reputation and communities is critical for putting our social networks back in their users' control.

The network model is based on physical principles of electrical current flow and implements insights from the function of the neural networks of the brain to create a unique ecosystem where information is directed to where it will be appreciated and utilized well. This creates a stream of information that is most relevant to the user and their communities, and that will promote the generation, curation, and engagement with content on the network.

Completely decentralized and distributed

The core of Synereo is fully decentralized and distributed, relying on modern peer-to-peer technologies. These are used for all of the important functions of the network:

• Conveying encrypted communications
• Storing these communications and all other data created on Synereo
• Executing application logic functions

There is never any single point of failure. The system cannot be taken down.

You own your information

Synereo is completely proofed against spying. Using asymmetric encryption, you are free to decide who may or may not view your profile and the content you create. Even the creators of the network have no power to overrule your choice.

Your speech is protected. Your account may never be blocked or restricted: you are free to express yourself to whomever wishes to hear what you have to say.

Does not rely on the centralized Internet

Synereo is Mesh-Network compatible, and does not rely on the centralized Internet.

The system cannot be blocked or restricted by centralized powers such as governments or Internet service providers. The network can never be shut down. Synereo is innately compatible with distributed, peer-to-peer wireless network technologies, assuring that as long as smart devices are in range, no central Internet service provider is required for smooth functioning.

You own your identity. You own your communities

You are free to construct and present your identity as you see fit, including both plural identities and complete anonymity. You may even post anonymously to your established network of friends. Synereo understands how your identities vary across the many networks you participate in, and is built to minimize the constraints on your expression, and to maximize the diversity of the communities you can form and the interactions you may have.

Unique interaction types

Beyond traditional social networking tools and supercharging content with AMPs, Synereo gives the user a variety of tools for managing their networks. Think consensus checks within a community to determine the collective attitude towards some event or cause, or built-in fundraising tools and collaborative scheduling apps for putting that community to work.

The electrical flow analogy lets us imagine the user as a gatekeeper to their communities of engagement, controlling how information flows into an out of a Synereo. Imagine business offering discounts and bonuses for passing their messages along to your friends. Imagine putting your social networks to work for the causes that matter most to you.

Every interaction on Synereo is handled by a smart contract. These contracts are infinitely expandable, allowing our community of users to invent new and interesting ways to interact.

• You, the user. By contributing to the strength and health of the network and participating in the Attention Economy, you receive tokens that you can use to Amplify your voice or to sell on the market. These tokens have an inherent value, as they can be used to increase the chances of a message getting a user’s attention. The more you do for the network, the more your attention is worth.

• You, the content producer. Through direct compensation for user-generated content, Synereo puts users back in control of their content, to rise and fall directly on the support and passion of its community. Synereo makes it easy to find your communities and grow your project on your terms.

• Advertisers. Advertisers allocate significant resources in an attempt to optimize the reach of their campaigns and outsmart content delivery algorithms. An entire ecosystem of advertising middlemen profit from programmatic advertising; buying and selling ad spaces, bidding for your attention in real time, using retargeting mechanism and attribution models, and generally adding nothing to the quality of the content.
  Based on our novel attention model, Synereo will provide advertisers with the full gamut of tools necessary to reach their natural audiences, decimating the costs otherwise lost to both these advertising middlemen and to the centralized platform.

• People living in communication-restricted countries that cannot access non-decentralized social networks. Due to the underlying technological nature of the protocol, it is impossible to restrict access to it or take it down, just like with Bitcoin.

• People who do not wish for the NSA and other such entities to be aware of every detail of their lives. Using the same cryptographic principles underlying the Bitcoin technology, each user of the system may choose his level of privacy, which will be impenetrable to everyone, including the developers of the system.

AMPs, Synereo’s tokens, serve as a way to Amplify the flow of information in the network, increasing its ability to propagate to peers. They work in two ways:

1) A user may Amplify his own posts: status messages, pictures, created events, etc. Depending on the amount of AMPs used, the post will gain greater visibility in the feed of his Synereo friends - and in adjacent, connected Synereos through them. A user may also Amplify his friends’ posts in such a manner, helping to propagate the friends’ messages. Thus, a group of friends may band around a common interest and Amplify it together, making sure it is heard as it reaches more of their collective Synereo.

The originator of Amplified content will receive a portion of the AMPs invested by his peers. Another small portion will be used for the maintenance of the platform and as rewards for “mining”. The majority of AMPs will go to those who are exposed to the content, compensating them for their time and attention.

2) Advertisers may use AMPs to created sponsored messages, reaching target audiences based on their interests and activity on the network. NOTE: A user of the system may always opt-out of receiving messages from specific advertisers, about specific topics, or altogether.

Most of the AMPs used to advertise to you will be paid to you directly. This is a way to gain from your participation in the network and from the value you generate for it. The more you participate, the more the network is familiar with you and your interests, and the more influence you have on the network, the more your attention is worth!



1) AMPs can be bought during an initial crowdfunding phase which will fund the development of Synereo and its deployment. We are in touch with various escrow service providers to provide our backers with a smooth and secure solution. Sign up on Synereo.com to receive updates!

2) Registering for Synereo and migrating your information from an existing social network account.

3) Expanding Synereo by inviting users who register on the network and migrate to it.

4) Bounties. People working to contribute to the development, deployment, and expansion of the network will receive AMP rewards for their efforts. More information coming soon!


Attention Model Presentations:
Chapter 1

Synereo is built from the ground-up using a novel model that is based on Attention Economy principles. This is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as the scarce commodity. Treating your attention as having an inherent power to influence your reputation and communities is critical for putting our social networks back in their users’ control.

The model is based on physical principles of electrical current flow and implements insights from the function of the neural networks of the brain to create a unique ecosystem where information is directed to where it will be appreciated and utilized well. For the user, this creates a stream of information that is most relevant to him and that promises to lead to the sort of engagement that complements his Synereo best.

As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available on the Internet, attention has become the limiting factor in the consumption of information. Attention economics applies insights from cognitive science and artificial intelligence to enable content consumers, producers, and intermediaries to better manage the flow of information.

In a sense, Synereo is an organic collaborative filtering system. One where information flows to you not because a machine learned a rule for analyzing your behavior on the net, but because your networks have been shaped in a particular manner based how and your peers allocate your attention. This allows communities to self-organize and develop on their own terms.  

In our model, each user - a node on the network - connects with other users around it in two different ways:

1) By forming “superconductive” connections with other users, creating a “Home Synereo” for himself
2) By joining topical Synereos - a cross between a group and a hashtag - and forming looser connections with others interested in specific ideas and subjects

Reo


Every user in Synereo has a “Reo” score in his Home Synereo and for each of the other Synereos he joins. This is an indication of his ability to produce and facilitate content worthy of attention. By posting high-quality content that is appreciated by others, a user’s Reo increases. By engaging with the content of others, a user’s Reo can influence the way that content flows across the network.

Users with high Reo in a Synereo enjoy many benefits:

• Their content gets more organic exposure
• They receive more AMPs for their attention
• The content they see has a higher chance of being relevant to them

The more Reo a user has, the more his attention is worth, and the more it costs to attract. To reach a user with a high Reo score, content must either be posted by someone with high Reo, receive attention from others first, or be from a close friend within a Synereo.

On top of these options, content may be AMPed, ensuring that more people of higher Reo are reached. Amping content increases its exposure in the Synereos it’s posted to, making your voice heard over others’.

This Amplification system is what gives Synereo’s token, the AMP, its inherent value. And while your friends and interest groups will not necessary use AMPs in day to day activities, advertisers wishing to send unsolicited information your way will have to use it to pay you for your attention.

Note: a person of any Reo score going over a stream will eventually be able to view all content posted to any Synereo they are in.

With these tools, Synereo allows an individual’s reputation to develop as a consequence of their social activity and through feedback from a community of peers. Human culture has always been the emergent product of this dynamic interplay between individual and community identity. Making this dynamic explicit by quantifying social influence will bring the project of social networking to the next level.

Synereo will let you see how your actions influence those around you.
Synereo will help you learn who you are and how well you fit in your vast social network.
Synereo will help teach you what your networks need, and will reward you for your help.  
Our Synereos will help us all work together a little bit better than we could before.

The above describes only the essence of the model and puts it in words. For the full picture, see our Attention Model White Paper - coming soon, as we are getting a defensive patent.



Facebook’s advertising revenue for Q2 2014 was $2.68 Billion. This is the sum of money that was spent for Facebook content visibility alone, and does not account for resources invested in the creation of the content being advertized or the middlemen optimizing this process.

This grand economy relies on us - the users of the social network - in its entirety, but we do not share in its gains. Advertisers on these networks are not happy campers, either. The advertising platforms, along with the service providers, are profiteering middlemen that take a major cut for supplying your attention to them.

How is advertising on Synereo different?

• Synereo users are a real part of the advertising ecosystem rather than merely existing as pawns on someone else’s playing board. The advertisers’ funds do not remain in the hands of major corporations, but are delivered straight to potential customers around the globe as a form of compensation for their attention.

• Synereo enables a two-way relationship between advertisers and prospects. Advertisers can target specific Synereos, contributing AMPs to causes, communities, organizations or projects - and the people that enable them. On the other hand, an advertising campaign initiated by a popular charity or cause can maintain minimal advertising spend while relying completely on "crowdsourced" AMPing by its supporters.

• Synereo’s information flow logic greatly benefits advertisers who have committed to content excellence, increasing the spread of content engaged with by users recognized for their curation abilities and positive influence on the network; their ability to contribute to the attention economy underlying Synereo.

• Similar to real-world viral campaigns, a well planned advertising effort would target influencers of the relevant topics and audiences to the campaign with excellent content that, if appreciated, will be distributed on Synereo organically rather than by “brute forcing” it with AMPs.
     
  The lesser the quality of the content you see, the more you will be compensated for it!

• Brands may create “smart contracts” (see below) with influential “brand ambassadors” to distribute content to their Synereos. These ambassadors will aim to bring high quality content that may be appreciated by their peers, or their ability to influence their Synereo further will suffer.

The core of Synereo is fully decentralized and distributed, relying on modern peer-to-peer technologies. These are used for all of the important functions of the network: conveying encrypted communications, storing these communications and other data created on Synereo, and executing application logic functions in a consensual, peer-approved manner.

This ensures that:

• There is never any single point of failure. The system cannot be taken down as long as there are users interested in its operation.

• The system is completely proofed against spying. Using asymmetric encryption, you are free to decide who may or may not view your profile and the content you create. Even the creators of the system have no power to overrule your choice.

• Your speech is protected. Your account may never be blocked or restricted: you are free to express yourself to whomever wishes to hear what you have to say.

• The system cannot be blocked or restricted by centralized powers such as governments or Internet service providers. Unless the Internet is shut down, Synereo remains accessible!

• But the network can never be shut down! Synereo technology is innately compatible with mesh networks, assuring that as long as smart devices are in range, no central Internet service provider is required for smooth functioning.

Utilizing the same concepts and framework brought on by the Bitcoin blockchain, each user will acquire a private key that provides him with access to his identity on the network. This will allow users to send and receive all forms of communications with as much privacy as they wish to have and form networks with friends using their unique identifiers.

To accomplish our goals, we will have to innovate technologically. However, there exists working proof of concepts for all of the tools which will underlie the platform we aim to create, and so we believe that the technological risk involved is small. We also have many fallback plans allowing us to build Synereo using less complex technologies while slowly implementing the full feature set required for the complete realization of this project.

We are currently in talks with representatives from major next-gen crypto-protocols to determine whether we can collaborate on creating our system. We are reviewing the state of the technologies and will decide whether any of these platforms are mature enough to reliably base our project on or if it will be simpler and faster to build something directly serving our needs, which are more focused.



We aim to provide an experience that is in line with the cutting edge of modern social networks - at the minimum. Users will be able to form communities, create events and pages, privately message each other, post status updates, pictures and videos, and so on.
The open-source and extensible nature of the technologies used will allow constant improvement to the functionality and user experience at all levels, and those will take into account our actual needs rather than rely on the capitalistic drive to increase the money-raking potential of the system.

At its core, Synereo is about allowing you to maximize your use of time and attention. You will be able to customize the default layout such that you’re exposed to your preferred information stream - arranged based on the design our attention model has prepared just for you - or sorted in any other way you like.


At Synereo, we are well aware that there is a barrier to the creation and successful operation of a new social network - even if it’s a next-generation one.

We are all heavily invested in current social networks. They have our entire social network activity history, interests, group affiliations, and so on - along with the huge user base already there to play with it. They have our information - we gave it to them willingly - and they know what our networks’ topologies are.

Fortunately for us, this information has been ruled to be our property - and we are free to take it and go elsewhere!

To facilitate this operation and make it seamless for you, we are going to create the tools required for you to enjoy a simple and automatic migration process, allowing you to carry over ALL of your social activity history and network information over to Synereo - or any portion of it that you desire. (Some of us would be happy to get a fresh start!)

Not only that, but we will also highly reward those of you who choose to migrate and seed the network with their information, now under their direct and unwavering control.



Dor Konforty

Dor started mining Bitcoin on May 2011, and has been living and breathing crypto since.
An expert on collaboration on the net and the wisdom of crowds, he is the architect of Uru, a novel online deliberation system. Has a master’s degree in neurobiology from an interdisciplinary brain research program in Tel-Aviv University. A graduate of the Israeli Air Force computer unit. A child of the Internet.

If you want to discuss Synereo with me, Come to the Inside Bitcoin TLV conference, held in Tel-Aviv on 19-20 of October, where I will be hosting the Bitcoin 2.0 technologies panel.


Anderson McCutcheon

Andy comes from a diverse programming background, having served in IDF's 8200 unit and developed real-time climate control & management systems before turning his love for gaming into a Poker related career. Having built several successful communities, he has spent the last few years managing marketing for the world’s biggest real money gaming brands.
Loves lamp.



Yuval Adam

Yuval is a full-stack technologist, with experience ranging from building distributed web services through deploying wireless mesh networks and to embedded systems development. Yuval founded the Tel-Aviv chapter of CryptoParty, advocating for privacy and digital liberties. He holds a B.Sc in Computer Sciences from Ben-Gurion University.
Yuval can usually be found lurking in the dark corners of the Tel-Aviv Makers hackerspace.


Greg Meredith

Greg Meredith has supported his math habit by working in computing. He was the principal architect of Microsoft's BizTalk's Process Orchestration offering and took on the burden of contributing to the early WSDL spec to keep it from being more of a train wreck than it is. He also worked on Microsoft's super secret BigTop project, working on an OS and Programming Language pair, based on process calculi. Prior to that he was one of the core members of the Carnot Team at the first industrial research consortium, the now defunct MCC. There he worked with Christine Tomlinson on Rosette/ESS, a fully reflective actor-based programming language with a high performance execution engine.


Daniel Estrada

Daniel teaches Engineering Ethics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has been writing about digital politics and network theory online for about a decade, and is currently the only person in the world that uses G+.





YOU:

Think you can contribute to Synereo? Don’t hesitate to send an email to dor at synereo dot com.

We’re looking for developers as well as experts in the various fields related to the project. You know who you are.



Watch this thread, sign up for updates on Synereo.com, follow us on our blog, and help us spread the message!

Contact us:

founders@synereo.com

Getting 'REO' AMP'ed For Synereo, Subscribed 'Watch' & 'Notify' . . .

Hello thread, looking forward to hear everyone's thoughts!

A few days ago I wrote an essay in preparation for the announcement that covers some of the theoretical background and motivation for our approach to this project. There's already a lot to process in this thread, but if people are interested in the project they might want to take a look:

Our social networks are broken. Here's how to fix them.

We will have a sale of AMPs, Synereo's tokens. These will appreciate in value as the network grows, since the more people there are on the network, the more attention each AMP buys.

Very interesting, will be watching

Watching. Looks very interesting at this point, can't wait to hear more.

At last, 

Keeping one eye open on this lol

I'm glad to see attempts to create a distributed token-based social network.
Diaspora failed because there was no monetization model, only ideas.

With Synereo you can motivate developers and early adopters to try it out, and if it works and the network later becomes huge, they will win big time (as well as everyone else, because we will be getting a decentralized open source social network).

Wishing you guys good luck!