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It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up
edmicman notes that "Wired has an article, "Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up", that calls for the greater programming community to create a truly "open" social network. Specifically, the problems with today's networks, says the author, is that their content is not available to everyone."
I will be out to dinner tonight at 8pm, so that will be a good time to rob my house.
I wasn't aware almost everyone in the world had internet access....
Ok FOAF isn't really up to par with facebook, but I think it gives the right direction. RDF would allow people to create networking sites that'd be open to everyone, encryption might enable information to be available only to member of special groups etc. The key idea is to decentralize information.
\u262D = \u5350
There's still no truly great way to stalk people anymore!
I'm not sure what the complaint really is here. Market forces and web site design combined to create places like Facebook, people signed up, and it was successful? Alternative ideas are better, but haven't worked?
The article raises interesting points but I'm not sure there's any "there" there. If you build it, they will come. If they like it.
Don't discount some of the suggestions in the article will emerge, but market and social forces prevail. As long as these social networking metaphors are popular and users come and go of their own free will, life is good.
I'm not sure the sublime or transcendental solution Wired seeks exists, or should. The internet is a network, electronic. It's a powerful tool. (..., the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes.(!)) I'm not sure life was meant to be played out on the internet, anyway.
(For the record, I'm no big fan of these web sites... I think they're more fad than substance, but I embrace others' freedom to participate.)
WTF? Part of the appeal of many of these sites is that it is restricted in some manner that that current users enjoy.
'Open social networks' is greed-speak for 'easier SPAM access' AFAIAC.
Blar.
Something that I was actually thinking about this morning is why are people friends with some, and not with others. Its because most people use their friends to feel better about themselves. I'm not saying they abuse their friends, I had a shitty weekend and sitting around laughing with my buddies on Sunday night at the bar made me feel amazingly better.
My point is, I had this feeling of "this is us, these are my friends and this is where I belong". It took me about a year and a half to become a fully-accepted member of this social group.
It wouldn't suprise me if the future trend of social networks is to become more and more closed off and exclusive. Like having to do interviews and personality tests to see if you are accepted into the group.
I think part of the reason these sites are so popular is because they are *not* open. People like feeling as if they art part of a group, no matter how open that group may be in reality, if there is even a hint of the "velvet rope" effect its generally enough to make people feel special.
And the general public likes to feel special.
What, me worry?
.. the appleseed project anyone? The author has been working at it for ages. So there already is an open social network..
I like the comment that Wired "tried to build an open social network, and failed". Makes me think that Wired doesn't have a clue about Social networking in the first place (and why would they?)
The crux of the complaint here is that in order to view someone's profile on Myspace/Facebook, you need to create an account. I guess I fail to see what's difficult about creating an account on a free service. Concerned about privacy? It's easy enough to set up bogus info. I guess I don't see the argument here.
Is this just an advertisement for a new social network? Trying to create buzz around something that may fail for the sole reason that we we have is good enough?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
More open social networks -> More sexual predators
If we open up social networking and make it a community effort, who gets to sell it for millions?!?!?!
i support the right to offend.
Hardware cost, bandwith etc. are the things that need to be 'available' to get things like this running. And that problem can be fixed in two ways, with advertising, which created the need to restrict access to the data to 'things which can show ads', or through a subscription fee which usually puts of the users en thus kills the data.
Maybe some P2P system could fix this, but that whould require users to install certain software which generally slows adoption quit a bit.
Or someone should donate a proper serverfarm with sufficient bandwith, surely there will be people writing for it.
Part of the reason I've always thought social networking sites were stupid is because it was a weird boundary to keep-- everything has to be on their site. Sure, that makes sense from the point of view of the business running the site, but I don't think it makes sense from a business standpoint.
It would make more sense to me if people were able to create a set of standards for online profiles, access-controlled by something like OpenID, that could be linked from various sites. That way, I could design my own site, my own profile, my own weblog, keep all my data in one place and under my control, and have the linking between these sites be the "social network".
I just think it's stupid that, if you want to participate in these communities, you have to go duplicating your data all over the place. I know people who had a profile on Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and their own site, and spent a bunch of time trying to keep the profiles in sync. i never joined any because I refuse to take these things seriously until it's an actual open and dynamic way to establish a real social network, rather than a means to generate ad revenue for some creepy company that caters to teeny-boppers and child-molesters.
I think sites like MySpace and some of the others need to focus more on user security before they go all "Facebook". I can't tell you how many people who have come to me with complaints that their accounts got haxor'd because they didn't take precautions and got phished. A good social networking website will be genuinely foolproof before moving on to third party apps.
The game.
While I'm all for the ancient hacker creed of data wanting to be free, it does not work. It simply does not.
This would first of all require people to actually accept freedom of speech as the freedom of someone whose opinion or attitude they do not agree with. Try to start an open, unmoderated discussion group on a controversal topic (needn't even be abortion or capital punishment, emacs or vi already does the job) and within minutes you'll drown in opinionated, information-twisting and "FACT: I AM RIGHT!" messages.
Do you want that in your discussion group?
Not to mention that not much later (or maybe even sooner) you'll drown in important information where you get your penis enhancing products and that Lilly really wants you to see how naked she is on her webpage.
If people did "behave" in social networks and be civil and rational, it could work. People aren't, though. And for this reason, I reserve the right to choose who may read my messages, who may discuss with me and who I do not want near any place I frequent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's basic human psychology that social networks become more robust by exclusion rather than inclusion.
Facebook opened itself to high schoolers and eventually to the public, much to the dismay of its original college base. Facebook's revenue increased at the cost of its perceived "integrity" by the original members.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
The article does not address the issue of privacy. Facebook and myspace, and xanga, allow users some amount of granularity to control who can view their personal data, which is one of the draws of these websites. Let me start a blog, post my home address and phone number and who I'm dating on it, and let google index it for spam-harvesters and identity thieves to come get? I don't think so.
to open up
Why bother when you have the support of DemocRATS?
Cheers,
George W. Bush.
Facebook, at least in my experience, is free of spam -- unlike, say, e-mail. Opening up the network would allow all the problems that currently plague e-mail (and, in my much briefer experience prior to deleting my profile, MySpace), thus reducing the value of Facebook to its users. I also trust, within reason, Facebook to not display my personal data to anyone except those on my friend lists. I don't want the "content" available to everyone, which is the whole reason Facebook took off in the first place -- people I want to see my profile can (friends, classmates), and everyone else can't. This article is a call to fight a problem that doesn't exist and that the author will create.
Thank Thor! I never want to access a social network...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
My impression of social networks is that too much information is already available to everyone. The privacy concerns created by Facebook et al. are staggering; I can't believe that someone in the open source community seriously supports making such information even more easily available.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
The WWW is already full of standards, right there for anybody to use: FOAF (mentioned before), microformats, and, yes, hyperlinks!
It's just a BloJJ
Since they cut my comments off of the article summary :-)
Seriously, the best thing about Facebook is that it's closed to everyone but specific people that I want to allow. Nobody but my friends (or people in my network, Facebook offers a variety of privacy options) know what I'm up to, can see my favorites, or see my wall postings. I don't want random people to know specific things about my life. However, Facebook still allows you to do broad searches on specific fields in specific networks, but you can't access the real information until you become friends.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I'm not familiar with Facebook etc., but I am familiar (and use) mixi, the most popular Japanese SNS. One of the reasons it got so freakin' popular was because it was "closed." You can't see the content unless you're a member, and you can't be a member unless someone invites you to become one. It sort of played on whether you were "in" or "not in", the social ego we all have to a certain degree. Highschool cliques all over again, except this time the geeks started it off.
Many other Japanese players have tried to gain market share, but they all fail, because they ARE open wide to anyone that signs on without an invitation. "mixi" was one of those things that was in the right place at the right time, when people were sort of getting tired of idiots that wandered in and made comments on their blogs, or even worse, a spam-bot that kept working around circumvention efforts. A single person being "closed" doesn't work so well, but an entire community, perhaps like a gated community, was a pretty good call. In the beginning, everyone used their real name because everyone was "invited" by someone with a real name and face, thus it was relatively safe to disclose personal information. Things have changed over the years a bit, and disclosing personal information is probably no longer a good idea, but it still has a much more "closed community" sense where netiquete is taken a bit more seriously than other places. It's kinda nice, you get to keep in touch with people, find long lost friends, and so on so forth.
I find it mildly amusing that how "open to all, available to all" internet sites that made the internet so popular to non-geeks in the first place took a turn and the "not so available to all" was found to be rather cozy.
> Want to show somebody a video or a picture you
> posted to your profile? They have to have an account.
Yup, but that's an enabler, too. For example, you can have an app that allows for conversations to develop around a video. Rather nice.
Disclaimer: I helped work on that one, tech details here.
The Army reading list
I'm sure what is so hip about Myspace or Facebook, but I prefer professional social networking. I prefer LinkedIn.com for my social networking. It allows me to link up with current/past coworkers and friends. I would rather not have a Myspace/Facebook account and have something more professional showing who I work and relate with. To be honest, I have never felt the need to 'blog' or show questionable photos on the internet....maybe thats why I stay away from those sites.
FYI, this is not a SPAM for LinkedIn, just a comment on the site. Being employeed in a global company, I'm actually surprised by the number of people that have a LinkedIn accounts (even executives).
> Specifically, the problems with today's networks, says the
> author, is that their content is not available to everyone.
No, they're a huge success. Your problem (you, "the author") is that nobody wants to invite you to be their friend. I wonder why?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Internet detectives are successful and creepy enough as it is even WITH "closed networks."
Nevermind the fact that he's wrong and you can make your Facebook page (or at the very least your photo albums) open to the whole web. I found this out after mine was accidentally indexed in Google.
I remember back when it first came out facebook was nicknamed stalkerbook. As a matter of fact, www.stalkerbook.net still forwards straight to facebook. Now, why did it earn that nickname? Because all of the information was "public" in that anyone who was your friend could see all your information and see whenever it changes. They would know when your classes are, when your going to be at a party, when you'll be studying, with minimal effort. In addition they would know 20 different ways to contact you from AIM to your Cell number, to possibly where you are living at the moment. And remember, this was all on a "one way street" as the author had put it. All the viewing of the information had to be pre-approved in one manner or another. Now, the author is proposing that we essentially get rid of that approval process and have all sites work with one another. It would essentially castrate social networking sites, not for the "exclusiveness" that others have been preaching, but rather because all of the information would be extremely vulnerable. IMO the better project, which the author did touch upon, would be the opening instant message clients to work with one another. Allowing AIM to contact MSN, or my Jabber account to contact either of them would be great, even if it will never work due to corporate mentality.
After seeing what most MySpace pages look like, I think it's not such a bad thing that the content on social networking sites is not freely available! And with the API having been opened up to allow the launch of a million and one chintzy and loud page gadgets, I'm not too worried about Facebook being closed either. Besides, wasn't the allure of the social networking sites hanging out and sharing with a few (hundred?) friends, and not the whole friggin internet?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
The future of social networking isn't about telling everyone what you had for dinner, well, not in the Twitter way anyway, it's about deriving content from the experience, in other words, writing a review of the restaurant you visited and making it available for syndication, more like Technorati but with attribution and maybe even reward, or indeed what the original idea of the world wide web was, at a deeper level - where the link was the basic principle of Sir Tim's version of the Web, it becomes the article, or indeed the video, the song or the slideshow. Hmm, I sense another website coming on...
Without even reading TFA, it's obvious that the author doesn't have clue.
The point of Facebook and similar networks is that access is controlled. The concept of a Friends list is what makes it work.
A lot of people want a place that will allow people to find them, to even follow what they're doing in their lives, but where they can also restrict who sees how much data. Facebook provides that.
Critical to understanding this is to realize that our ideas about privacy are changing rapidly, and different people have different expectations and comfort levels with respect to what they want to share, and who they want to share it.
What I place on my web site is different from what I blog, and is different from my Facebook profile and a Facebook group about a current romance. And each of those reaches a different population, some by chance, some by design and control.
No, the author lacks an understanding about all of this.
Three Squirrels
Keep MySpace off of it. Not because MySpace is awful, or that the users are idiots. But because they insist that everyone know "Tom." Either there'd have to be a list of accounts various systems use for maintenance, or everyone will just put up with being in everyone else's extended social network thanks to fucking Tom.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
...as in non-proprietary, does not mean that there are no access controls whatsoever.
Of course any reasonable open implementation would allow you to make certain things visible only to certain people.
Does it? Is myspace / facebook the new "geocities"? Think about it. They were designed, from the beginning, to represent "circles" of friends - either with the open myspace or the closed "forced network" of facebook.
But people keep crying that they aren't exactly what they could have if they just looked elsewhere - that is to say, a webpage. A personal webpage, with a network people use. (Which is where geocities failed back in the 90s. (among other reasons...))
I have only ever used myspace or facebook to reconnect with people once or twice and have always brought the conversation with them into a better medium - chat, email, "lj" (Blog websites are not more like "real" webpages, however LJ actually has a community that works.), or even *gasp* the telephone and face-to-face visits.
To the people that use myspace or facebook and expect to be able to link to individual images so they can show grandma... I say, "you are using it wrong."
While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.
While we've largely outgrown the limitations of reality, no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends in reality.
Not all problems can be solved through programming.
Social networks are successful precisely because they are closed. You have no business in my little black book, and I have no business in yours.
No jack-ass, I like the segmentation offered by islands like Facebook.
Blar.
Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
This guy doesn't get it. That's the whole freaking point of social networking, and why facebook is so popular while MySpace is now languishing.
I like the fact that when I enter my cell phone number and upload photos to facebook only my approved friends can see those details.I like the fine-grained permissions that allow me to say people in my univeristy network can view my email address, but not my home phone number.
If I want everyone and their dog to be able to see my photos I'll upload them to a public Picassaweb album or any number of other photo sharing sites.
The reason "open" social networks would never work is you couldn't control the information properly. There would be no way to enforce these types of permissions properly with any kind of reliability.
Finger.
Finger was pretty much a social network, before the concept existed. It had your personal information, some personal space, and a little place for you to log what you were doing (.plan). Community messaging? E-mail. Finger addresses pretty much mapped to e-mail accounts.
I was recently considering setting up a finger server for myself, basically because I liked the retro idea of it. I'm too young to have actually used it (aside from reading Carmack's info a couple of times) at it's prime, so I've always kinda wondered about it. It sounds, though, like the perfect way to start up an open social network.
I mean, it's college, the point is to meet new people. But now my profile is locked down tighter than NORAD, because I have to worry that some zombie in HR is going to freak out that I had a beer once.
I was out of college by the time MySpace and Facebook got popular (so I still don't really *get* them), but I *have* seen employers do this. I saw a girl lose a position because someone found images of her posing topless with her sorority. Apparently the pic was pretty well known on Facebook. She almost certainly never knew why she got passed over, but having someone on the inside killed her job prospects.
The whole point of Facebook is that it's a "walled garden." "Walled gardens" are walled so that they are safe and trusted places. Sites like Facebook are no different. Not everybody is into full 100% exhibitionism, but many do want to have a place to advertise their lives to people they trust a little.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I agree. One of the better things about MySpace is that a user has a certain amount of control over what is and is not open to the public. This makes it a safer environment for kids who want to have pages and gives both the teen and the parent peace of mind to know that their information the is only available to a select crowd.
I seriously do not see why this is modded as a troll.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
So apparently 6Billion out of the 6.6Billion (Ref) people on earth have interweb access! Some how overnight the Internet usage went from 1.1Billion (Ref) to 6Billion overnight!
To debunk this author just a little more, Facebook has a comprehensive developer system which allows anyone to program features in to facebook. And the beauty is, facebook controls the style of the interface so it doesn't look like myspace does
>
looks like a plus to me.
The point is to make APIs so that you can access the data with a defined protocol rather than with a web browser -- one can change the transport, and still keep the same authentication / data limiting~
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I signed up with Facebook precisely BECAUSE my content isn't accessible to all. I don't want it accessible to all - I want it accessible to people I choose to make it accessible to.
>
You will if you run out of wet paint to watch.
The content is not available for everyone?
Of course not! That's what makes it social network.
I want to control my own personal data to the social segment that I want to open up.
I want to define what and to whom I am allowed into my social circle.
I'm very happy to see someone finally make the point that I've been mulling for what seems like eons now. I see many of the points made by previous replies, but my primary beef is: duplication of data in various "networks". This is exactly why I've never really "gotten" this social networking thing in the first place. I flat-out refuse to spend the greater portion of my free time keeping various profiles in sync. Its moronic.
If an open standard could be established, I think some really amazing things could happen.
But I also think the point is well made, "Then who would make millions off of it?"
Livejournal does supports OpenID, which is basically what the site in this article is trying to do. Basically, with OpenID, if you're a member of any site that uses OpenID then you can use that login on any other site that uses it, and thus have access to information on all the participating sites. Livejournal, Wordpress, and AOL.com are a few of the sites that use it. I don't know how much use it gets; I don't think I've seen anyone post on Livejournal that doesn't actually have a LJ account, but then I don't check everyone's username. All those I've clicked on led to real LJs, though.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
The author compares social networking with DRM encrypted music. When you purchase music, you don't purchase the medium it comes on, but the music itself. Encryption inhibits the value of the product you have purchased. For social networking sites, their main gain is the number of users they have and the interaction between those users on their site specific, not the data's interoperability with other competitors. It's nice to live in a utopia to think everything should work with everything else, but a business entity does need to protect it's assets as well. Maybe if the author had argued there could be more interoperability between social networking sites and things like, say, youtube to add value added services, I could agree. But complaining because he has to actually register to view someone's data? bleh. Doesn't facebook have an API available?
Write software..
Have it run in either stand alone or networked mode.
Networked mode does a hub leaf method that IRC currently does..
Trusted sties act like hubs and they interconnect
You can log into any site using username@site
You can add friends through any networked site by adding firend@site.
The software would query though and present the content.
I was working on this with php-spacester but dumped the project..
string sig = llGetSig("dimentox"); llSay(0,sig);
Either the author never got invited to any of the 'cool' parties in high school. Or he's upset that teenage girls can block access to their pages by anonymous older guys.
Have gnu, will travel.
..is that one day, the State will create a public profile of me on a networking site for everyone to see, and I won't be able to do anything about it.
I think Facebook/MySpace/Orkut are ways to acclimatise people to the notion that privacy is an outdated concept and we'd better get used to it.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Two things that I'd really like to see...
I'm on Livejournal, and have a lot of friends who are on LJ as well. I know a lot of them also have myspace sites, but I hate myspace and don't want to use it. It'd be nice, though, if I could put their myspace blogs on the friends list for my LJ account and have everything in an RSS feed-like view so I can aggregate my friends blogs (including their protected friends-only posts) regardless of who they're hosted by, whether it be LJ, some other site that runs LJ's software, blogger, facebook, myspace, or whatever. Presently, this isn't doable so far as I'm aware, but it should be pretty easy to implement as long as everyone cooperated.
A friend of mine who I really liked reading was on Livejournal until the recent censorship flap caused him to migrate his blog to a service he felt respected free speech. Basically, he was not in violation of LJ ToS, or singled out for his blog's content, but he felt strongly enough that what LJ's management did was wrong that he no longer felt safe posting there anymore, and abandoned his blog in protest and moved it to another site where he felt safe. But a good 6 or 7 years of really excellent blog posts weren't able to be migrated to the new site, so he's starting over with no history and no readership. Since I don't feel like creating a blogger account so I can log in and read his protected posts or comment, I'm effectively cut off from this guy who's writing I've admired and enjoyed reading for many years. It'd be awesome if he could migrate an entire blog from one site or service to another, without losing either your backlog of posted blog entries or your readership. If this were possible, it would help bloggers resist censorship -- so long as at least one site offered ToS that respected the free speech and privacy rights of its users, there'd be a haven for their speech.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I've been working on a project called Appleseed for a couple years now. It's pretty far along, the distributed aspects are all functioning and only require optimization at this point, but it's still not quite out of beta yet.
As a proof of concept for distributed social networking, it works. Whether it's appleseed or something else, the idea of walled gardens such as MySpace or Facebook will seem as ridiculous as isolated services like Compuserve or Prodigy were.
Shoot, that's the whole reason I got on Myspace in the first place. Set the profile to where only your friends can view it, the monitor who your friends are. If I wanted the whole world to be able to see what I posted, I could just goto Geocities or something. Yeah, I have my own .com, and have a few things set up in areas where it requires a username and password to access it, but why bother anymore? Everyone I know has myspace, just approve them as friends, and they can see the stuff that I don't want the whole world to see.
Repeat after me, "I am not entitled to a large network of friends. No one should be forced to like me or associate with me. If I want to meet people and gain friends I will have to make myself more appealing to those people in some way."
Now, continue repeating that until you stop being a jackass.
I am a geek now, I have always been a geek. My definition of "Party" has always been slightly different that many other peoples. There was no shortage of social opportunity for me. I was just pickier about which ones I chose. There is NO REASON for the people I chose not to socialize with to have to allow me to participate in their group activities.
Bah. Why am I even responding to you...
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Users probably don't want all of the content from each of their social networks available on all of them. But it would be useful to have a standard mechanism for aggregating messages, announcements, and changes, so you could keep track of what's happening in your world without having to log into all of the things. A pull-type thing, like RSS, rather than a spammy push-type thing.
A standard format for events with dates, times, and locations would help, so the receiving end could slot them into a calendar and/or a map.
If you have, you know what it's a great idea for people to NOT be able to design their own profiles.
Coincidentally, I read a post today made by a friend of mine that mentioned that he hasn't updated recently, and if you wanted to see what he was up to I should check (insert the name of five other "social" sites here). I told him it'd be much easier for us (his intended audience) if he'd pick one, and stick with it. The company that wins will be the one who can aggregate feeds from all of these sites and come up with one consolidated "friend" page. That way the blogger gets the best features of all the sites, and th reader has one place to look for content.
...host their own site, and link to their friend's sites. Social networking sites are just a no-effort way to have interactive cross-linked web sites. Things like xml feeds and "link this" buttons are already making things fairly open. So does this all tie into persistant online identities? (instead of logging into a social site) Except when it's an open standard, anyone can host their own identity server, so then who do you trust to post to your social pages? Certain identity providers? Isn't that the same problem we had in the first place?
As an anarchist at heart I can't help but hope everything will one day be free, libre, open-source... but unfortunately I live in the real world and we have to be a bit more pragmatic
:(
:)
I doubt the open-source community could really support the centralised infrastructure that would be required for a resource hungry high-traffic social networking site like Facebook or MySpace; for the same reason free open-source Google probably wouldn't work
Then again i think Launchpad probably falls under the 'social networking site' category... but then that doesn't have all the gadgets and traffic that sites like Facebook have.
Perhaps we should be seeking more openness in the good social networking sites we already have like Facbook?
make a web page
If someone posted "Samba is open-source, so anybody on the web can read your files" you'd laugh at them. But when the parent post trolled in exactly the same way, the confusion between open-source programs and "wide-open" access to your data (because it's not a topic discussed all the time) lets him get away with it.
I didn't see this mentioned yet so thought I drop a link to ELGG, a very nice GPL PHP social network platform. Its mature, featured, and has a good support community. Check it out: ELGG.ORG
FTFA: Facebook would be better if you could link to friends' pages on MySpace and Bebo. The Facebook Platform lets you do just that. I recently made a flickr account and wanted to share those photos with my Facebook friends, so I used the "My Flickr" app to add a section in my Facebook profile that showed thumbnails from my flickr stream and provided a link to my flickr URL. I was also able to view which of my friends had added the app and added them as contacts on flickr. This was all made possible because flickr and Facebook both have APIs for developers.
I think he's arguing for open-standards, interoperable social networking. The "open" that he's talking about is very much the way that real social networks work. In the real world, you can call and speak and make friends with anyone in the world. The major limitation is pretty much language, which is something that would be very hard to change. From there, you can choose who you want to be in your social networks.
I just don't think he explained himself very well, or made a very strong argument for his case. On the internet, social networking is isolated in much the same way that we would be isolated in the real world if the phone and email systems from different providers could not communicate with each other. Think about it. "I'm on AT&T, so I can't call you because you're on Verizon". Or "I'm on Gmail so I can't email you because you're on Yahoo mail".
What should be open is this underlying infrastructure of protocols, and not necessarily the content of your profile. Ideally the protocols would allow the same granularity of access controls that the existing social networking sites allow.
FaceBook and MySpace already ARE open to everyone. The reson you have to be a member of Facebook to view the profile is because if ANYBODY could post, every idiot would post SPAM, avertisements for peinis pills, and other scams.
People use FaeBook and MySpace because they DON'T want to make their personal site available to everyone, only a select group of people that they choose. MySpace is ALREADY rife with spammers, and Facebook is beginning to head in that direction. People have the freedom to CHOOSE which social networking site they want to use. If I want to use only MySpace, then I will. If I want to use only Facebook, then I will. Why the hell should I let some half-baked "journalist" tell me I should be opening myself up to evey sinbgle social networking site on the Internet so he can get his "Openness Jollies"?
This idiot shouldn't be telling people that they should allow unrestricted access to their personal data to every user on the Net. Why don't we truly open up society and force everybody to leave their doors and cars unlocked? Beter yet, lets require the open-sourceing of PRIVATE THOUGHT!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I mean, just look at the IM networks.
Blar.
Wired is not complaining that Facebook itself is difficult to access. Their complaint is that there is no way to access the data within Facebook, from without. Can you aggregate, say, your news feed, and a particular friend's Facebook "photostream" (thank you Flickr for that Web 2.0 term) alongside CNN and Slashdot on, say, Google Reader or Bloglines? If you've not tried it, the answer is no. You could, of course, point to Facebook applications, but they're embedded into Facebook, not the other way around.
What Wired is talking about is a social networking site that either is an aggregate itself of other sites (what they tried to implement, and a neat concept) or, at least, makes its data available for use on other sites.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
It's open beta right now, but I believe that SocialDetour.com will give control to users as to what info they would like open to the rest of the net as well as to other users, their friends, and their personal friends.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
How about a Steve Man's Cyborg p2p social network cypherpunk-style?
n g
something like this:
http://www.totalworlddomination.org/guerilla-bp.p
based on all these ideas / tech:
http://guerillartivism.net/node/24
yes, mod me down! come on! try! i'm distributed! p2p! decentralized! go try! mouhahaha
Quite a few people have been writing about how Facebook is a walled garden the likes of which the Internet has not seen since AOL. I wrote a summary piece with excerpts from notable articles on that subject : "Facebook users haven't learnt and history repeats itself". I wrote is four days ago so it is quite timely !
Ughh. Death to all social networks.
Why do people flock to these gated, closed, proprietary online communities? They resemble far too much previous proprietary online enclosures like 'newbie-land' AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, old MSN incarnations, and similar.
I thought people hated being herded together in such online corporate cattleyards, which is why the open, standards based Internet flourished and those old behemoths all died off.
Perhaps the cycle will repeat itself though. The evolution of online Gitmos and ghettos like Facebook, MySpace etc will hopefully soon be followed by a user revolt against their limitations, not to mention the corporate capture of vast online reservoirs of user content by the likes of News Corp they represent.
FOAF baby!!!
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
This is the thinking behind Elgg. An open source, open platform social networking app. Why don't people do research before writing articles.
It's exactly because I CAN control who sees my info and media that I like Facebook. If just anyone could view my profile- I would not have the amount of stuff up there that I do, and I'm conservative with the sharing compared to some of my friends- they have every tidbit about their lives and past on their profile. I at least try to keep any unique-to-me-only data off there. Of course it doesn't help when other people post pictures of you and tag them without asking you if it's ok first... *puts on tin foil hat*
Fuck social networks and everyone who is on one. Have fun stroking each others' egos. You people are so fucking egotistical and insecure that, given the most exciting and versatile device ever invented (PC), you use it to set up circle jerking self-worship pages. Fuck-ing sad. I'm glad I'm not one of you pathetic losers. Fuck MySpace, fuck Facebook, fuck Orkut, fuck Friendster, fuck Classmates, and fuck G. W. Bush too. Bye, fuckers!
Why do people flock to these gated, closed, proprietary online communities?
Says the one still using Slashdot...
Yes, it's a pain, but people, just like you, use them because there isn't a choice.
The idea of an "open social network" is being badly misinterpreted.
//uses//, it won't do you any good to patch it, because users don't actually use the software on hardware they control.
the idea isn't that you don't have control of the privacy of your data from other users. Yes, privacy controls are good, whether from the public, or even from people you know. The only exception is that you just plain can't keep your data private from the social network itself. Which means they can sell you out to anyone from unscrupulous advertisers to corrupt public institutions.
As if that weren't bad enough, The problem with closed social networks is not just whether others have access to my data - it's whether *I* even have access to it. Yeah, sure, I can look at anything I publish - but if I want to search it, index, download, archive, or back it up, I'm out of luck. If my provider bungles a crash or turns evil, I'm screwed. And all the things that others have seen fit to give me access to, and our important in terms of my history and life online - private though it may be - are forever out of reach, except in the narrow, cramped contexts in which the network provider dictates.
More worrying is the fact that publicly licensed code doesn't actually solve the problem. Livejournal has been publicly licensed for many years, but if you actually want to add a feature to the site everyone
In a way, web services are the opposite side of the coin DRM is on. DRM seeks to restrict your freedom by limiting the software you can use on hardware you own; web services solves this problem far more elegantly and effectively by limiting the software you can use on hardware THEY own.
My name is Steve Moyer ( http://stevemoyer.us/ )
It's the data which is the 'gold' of the system, whether it is FaceBook, Google or MySpace.
If you open up the data you give away the gold. It's the way the economy works. You have to hold it in some secure manner so you can SELL it, even if that just means selling it by way of selling advertising.
The RIGHT thing to do is to share the data in the open. But money is evil and requires that it be held in secret.
We need a new economic system.
Steve