The important thing is to have a valid reason to think different. There are too many people who stubbornly press on because they drank the kool aid of their own uniqueness. They think being different is a value in itself.
As somebody who has been different their whole live, being different can happen when you don't take things as granted, because you will land on other conclusion as people who take things as granted.
But sometimes you will land at the same conclusion, for the obvious reason that a certain way of doing certain things is indeed very reasonable.
In my youth there were many people that tried to rebell against something, but in my eyes they defined themselves ex negativo: they acted a certain way because it was the opposite of the thing they didn't like. This is not free, because you are tightly coupled to the thing you want to differenciate yourself from. I always tried to instead decouple from those things and figure out which conventions are bullshit, which are in principle reasonable (but communicated or lived badly) and which are just prefect the way they are.
The key step however is not to take existing structure, culture and technology for granted and try to come up with your own ways of doing things. Realizing once in a while that you (badly) solved a problem that has been solved for decades can be humbling as well.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
No sir, you must give back today, every day, whenever you get a chance. A tree does not dream about a time when it is a certain size, at which point it will bear fruit. It simply bears whatever fruit it has, when it has it.
As somebody who has been different their whole live, being different can happen when you don't take things as granted, because you will land on other conclusion as people who take things as granted.
But sometimes you will land at the same conclusion, for the obvious reason that a certain way of doing certain things is indeed very reasonable.
In my youth there were many people that tried to rebell against something, but in my eyes they defined themselves ex negativo: they acted a certain way because it was the opposite of the thing they didn't like. This is not free, because you are tightly coupled to the thing you want to differenciate yourself from. I always tried to instead decouple from those things and figure out which conventions are bullshit, which are in principle reasonable (but communicated or lived badly) and which are just prefect the way they are.
The key step however is not to take existing structure, culture and technology for granted and try to come up with your own ways of doing things. Realizing once in a while that you (badly) solved a problem that has been solved for decades can be humbling as well.