(Read Part I and Part II here)

We're back for the third and almost, but not final installment of "Get to Know Your Fellow Netizens".  Here, we continue the in-depth look behind the scenes of Civil Netizen.  It's like a Connie Chung interview, without all the singing and rolling on the floor.

Who are our primary users?

Our user base is quite geographically distributed. Most of our early alpha users were from New York City since that’s where we are based and where many of our friends live. But we broke out of the five boroughs real quick. Besides having users throughout the US, we’ve seen lots of usage in other countries throughout Europe and Asia. Secure, simple file transfer is a universally needed function, and we hope and believe our solution is the most effective and most secure for all Netizens.

What are some of our greatest challenges with this project?

Increasing and nurturing our user base is a big challenge right now. File transfer is not the most popular or hippest topic around, but reliable file transfer is a long standing problem plaguing the Internet and is a fundamental service we need to perfect before we can layer sexier capabilities like peer transactions and semantic queries. As for what actual user-centric features we will build on top these capabilities, we hope to show those off on our blog.

Where do we see this project going from here?

In the next 6 months, we plan to improve on the parcel application to make it more reliable, more transparent, and more secure. We also need to add the concept of distributed identity called “Netizen ID”, so that we can actually show our users why we call this thing “Civil Netizen” and not something like “Civil Parcel” (which is a much more appropriate name for a personal file transfer application).

Eventually, we want to open up Civil Netizen as a development and deployment platform so that designer and developers with AJAX skills can build entirely self-contained web applications and run it inside Civil Netizen. The main benefit of the Civil Netizen platform is that your app can scale to millions of users without you having to pay for any hosting. All the user interface code of your app will run on your users’ local PC or Mac. Think of it as an extreme AJAX application that does everything inside the browser and communicates only with a local web server and database. As for connecting your community of users, Civil Netizen’s networking layer will take care of all of that for you. In other words, if the parcel application is our “Basecamp”, we hope Civil Netizen as a platform would be our “Ruby on Rails.”

What do we need to move on to the next phase of this project?

Right now, we need to increase our dialogue with the web community at large. Having been a secretive R&D operation for the last few of years, we have been more inclined to code than to talk. We are beginning to break that mold. (Doing this interview is a good start.) We have been designing Civil Netizen – the platform – to be the next big thing after Web 2.0 (We want dibs on Web 2.6). On that declaration alone, we have earned about a million skeptics. So a more open discourse surrounding the flaws of the current web and the opportunities that follow would certain help us refine our ideas and in turn our products and services.

So, do we even have a business model?

Yes… but we can’t share that! All humor aside, we’ve put a lot of time, in fact years, into this product and we’ve dreamt up lots of great features and products. Our business model doesn’t involve advertising and revenues will be generated directly from our users. A company is naturally going to favor the parties that actually write the checks. We want to make sure that we get paid by our end users so they can keep us focused on real world needs.

See you real soon for the final installment of GTKYFN...I promise!