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Breaking Open Facebook With FOSS
NewsCloud writes "Since last December, Facebook has grown from 12 to 47 million users and third-party developers have launched more than 6,000 applications with its API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends. Microsoft's recent $240 million investment in the company gives it all the capital it needs for further growth. Last August, Wired published two unusual stories describing how consumers might link together a variety of third-party services to emulate Facebook, and ultimately calling on the open-source software community to build alternatives to the service. Inspired in part by Wired, I've posted some ideas describing what would be needed for an open source architecture for social networking."
It sounds great! But EVERYTIME they fight eachother you get a notice of it. So I log in every morning(at work of course) to find out theres about 35 fights to go through.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
It's about time that there was some way to focus on the social network you're already with versus wading through "invitation-only hype" to get there.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends
Especially since we just learned that Facebook considers it a "perk" to allow their employees to surf people's profiles, read their email (which they're pushing HARD to get people to use as a sort of bastardized webmail) and see their "private" photos and such.
Oh yeah, and get your password, log in to your account, and upload explicit photos.
Please help metamoderate.
The point is not to actually have decentralization but rather the possibility to have it. To take an analogy think of open source projects, the point is not to fork them - on the contrary - but the ability to do so creates incentive that affect the result even though it's only one trunk.
Once a standard is accepted, there are less network effects. Think of email for example, since SMTP has such a long history it means almost anyone can have an email server. Sure gmail, yahoo mail hotmail or whatever will represent most of the traffic but it doesn't matter. Contrast this with IM... lack of interoperability creates huge network effect, the switching cost is very high because you need to coordinate with all of your contacts to switch.
If social network rely on semantic web languages, the competition between websites providing hosting / editing of information will be much more efficient than in the current system... outdated network won't die, they will just merge with the additional vocabulary from newer trendier sites. Innovative networks won't starve because they'll be able to piggy back on existing networks.
Eventually, websites will have value not by being "the biggest" or "the one where most of your friends are" but by providing the best description of your relationships with people or the most useful tools to extract the most relevant information out of your data.
\u262D = \u5350
As the author of the post, I'll disagree with that.
Hey, I think you are misreading my comment (which was just about the sweep of the description in TFS) if you think I don't care about social networking; I've been kind of idly interested in open (both in terms of "free/open source" and in terms of "freely interconnecting) frameworks for it for a while. There's lots of pieces of a solution out their (FOAF, etc.), the problem is putting the pieces together and getting everyone on the same page (and that last part applies, separately, both to users and developers, forming a sort of chicken-and-egg problem.)
Why does facebook need to be replaced by something open source? Is it offensive for them to make money?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
XFN, the XHTML Friends aims to identify relationships with links.
Imagine if everybody had a blog that used OpenID. This could be decentralized. Friends could then login with OpenId and be identified what relationship they are with the OpenID URL from XFN.
http://gmpg.org/xfn/
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
I really think this is a generation thing. While previous generations had telephones and "little black books" we have myspace and buddy-lists. Things like facebook, or myspace aren't really that new, IMHO they're sortof an evolution of the old party lines.
That said, lumping all devs out there in with those who think that facebook/myspace are reserved for 14 year old girls is ridiculous.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
If you think millions of kids are signing up to Facebook for its function, you're probably wrong. Most likely they're doing this to be in with the groovy (or whatever they're called now) kids. That relies on branding and brand awareness.
An OSS facebook has no branding and coolness (perhaps geekiness, but that is not cool). Just like Coke would not care about an opensource cola, Facebook does not care about an open source service.
And do you really think that youngsters are worried about privacy?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Centralized data source? The operators of the data source are always a security concern. They need to be both honest (and not invade your privacy) and noble (and not sell your data to third parties for a profit). It seems like pointing this out is the focus of the article, but it is not new information. Decentralized data source? You operate what data goes where, but it is a much harder system to support. The reason MySpace and Facebook are popular is because they are easy-to-use and non-technical people have adopted them as de-facto social meet/discussion places. I dare you to implement an easy-to-use decentralized social network. For Facebook in specific, it sucks that they took $$$ from Microsoft. This puts them in bed with a powerful influence in the software arena... and one that is not trustworthy for having any business ethics. By itself, I trusted Facebook. I still won't put anything on my Facebook profile that I would need to keep private. With Microsoft, maybe it is time to delete anything personal from the site...
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I don't understand the appeal of sites like "Facebook" or "Myspace". What they look like to me is web-based personal-website-creation tools. What is so interesting about a site that lets people make web sites about themselves? What am I missing? I already have a web site hosted on my own domain. Why would I want a Facebook or Myspace web site?
Speaking only for myself, it's the "social" aspect that I find value in. I like meeting new people and find social-networks like facebook pretty good for that. Being able to, for example, search for females who identify themselves as libertarians who live in my local community, is kinda cool. But really it could be anything... it's just handy to have another avenue to meet other people who have similar interests, whether it's politics, hobbies, reading, religion, whatever. The event posting thing is pretty cool too.
Don't get me wrong, social networks aren't perfect, and they aren't a replacement for meatspace interaction with real humans... but they're a nice complement to the other ways of socializing that we have.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Looks like a lot of nice theory and such, but WHERE is there a working prototype, something we can sink our teeth into, sniff, or hug?
What the thing might have or should have -- and this will hurt feelings -- is a measurement to show relationship (whatever kind it is) based on communication instances, volume, and more. Obviously, this means reading email between senders. I would not say go as far as posting the content.
But, say these "actors":
John
Vinh
Mary
Ving
Oster
Oscar
Susan
Kumiko
Davinder
KNOW each other and registered as friends. Some, but not all, communicate regularly. Some fewer communicate with a subset via various methods (poking, wall-messages, private messages, etc. maybe even extra-system tracking based on e-mail sensed in routers around the world... hey, the info IS there...), and these instances can be weighted, counted and presented. It would look like nodes with pipes, sort of like HP Openview did years ago, or like any ubiquitous graphical firewall/system monitor tool. Think: Etherape. It could be dynamic, static, or a mixed snapshot.
The upshot of this is that those freaks out there building falsely "deep" infatuous relationships will have their funky little bubbles burst when the the REST of the world can start to see past the misleading "Top # Friends" listing, which is pointless whether that list is static (like most) or "rotates faces" like F/B does.
It also would be interesting for husband/wife/other relationships when new tags have to be made to reduce relationship destruction. Wife has 52x more communication density markers with friends than she does with husband? Oh, how to assuage his fears, curtail his growing jealousies.
Markers such as Platonic Friend, Current item, Ex-, Professional, Hobby Group and more could be shaped and colored nodes, with strength modified by fatter tubes. Stagnant relationships could be shown in "broken" or light lines; stronger ones with wavy or fat lines. Active and stronger ones still can be shown with pulsating lines.
Suddenly, it's no longer gospel who your TOP x-number of friends are. The volume, density/depth, duration, constancy, and such of your communications will determine publicly or privately who your REAL best friends are.
I am sure Visual Analytics has something like this for their data mining for showing the IRS, FBI, and others the banking, cell phone, and other relationships between people, business or personal, for crime monitoring, marketing, and other purposes. But for social networking, I imagine something non-patented is common-sense or obvious, given the tools that exist to make this trivial.
However, I declare this text of mine to be freely available in Creative Commons and GPL-like terms that allow Open Source to implement this. I don't give a damn about any patent trolls so if Myspace or Friendster want to take this idea, GO FOR IT. Anything to diminish the inroads microshaft will try to make by/from hijacking Facebook.
I reserve the right to personally or in team implement my ideas written above into any projects I so desire, patents be damned.
Copyright 2007-10-29-1710 PST David Syes
Please pass this idea around.
S
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
With Microsoft, maybe it is time to delete anything personal from the site.
If you already put anything on Facebook that really shouldn't be there, it is far too late to take it down now. People don't seem to grasp the Ollie North effect: just because you "deleted" something doesn't mean it was removed from existence. Google won't even guarantee that it can permanently delete anything, and any major site is going to retain archived records for an indefinite period, which means it can still be distributed and sold to others long after you officially "deleted" it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's amazing how often I've looked at some random stranger's profile on Facebook and then ran into the very same person in real life shortly thereafter. What I wonder is if I've seen these people before and only took notice because of their Facebook profile, or if the encounter was purely a coincidence every single time.