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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'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
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,
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.