Slashdot Mirror
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."
and every single one drives me nuts. No, I don't want to post on your fucking SUPERWALL, be in your TOP FRIENDS list, or answer pointless quizzes.
There should be a way to turn off app requests...
I don't know what "us" you are talking about, but I've realized for years that Facebook has no effect on who, when, what, and how I connect with friends, and that's unlikely to change anytime in the near future.
I think the secret to efficient social networking is decentralization, both of content and of standards. This is achieved by the semantic web... Take a look at FOAF, it's a simple exemple of how it could work. Host a RDF/XML file anywhere describing your connections and you're done. Extend the kind of vocabulary describing your information and your relation to people at anytime using OWL.
RDF and OWL provide ways to develop a huge social networks with different features, different takes on it , with decentralized development and decentralized content while still maintaining interoperability. Support the semantic web it rocks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software)
\u262D = \u5350
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.
if you want convenience, you don't get privacy
if you want privacy, you don't get convenience
and some people are shocked, shocked i tell you, to find out that a lot of people don't treat their private life with the security protocols of a swiss bank. because they simply don't care
next nonissue please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Building an Open Source version of Facebook is probably one of the smartest thing people can do right now in this Web 2.0 (*shudder*) world. More to the point, privacy advocates should be actively boycotting Facebook if they know what is good for them. I refuse to use it. The people who maintain it have too much power and it has reached a level of social and interpersonal networking utility that trumps novelty and freedom for conformity.
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
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,
Cloning Facebook would be pointless. Unless your providing something above and beyond what Facebook offers, why bother? Average users won't be engaged by the privacy angle and so, won't switch.
Cool idea though. The real take away is that creating services like facebook are fairly trivial from a development standpoint. All these features are being reabsorbed by the various web app framework makers right now. Building a facebook2 should take a lot less than a quarter billion : )
I don't know what the hell kind of drugs you are on, but your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
That's a bad thing? Frankly I expect to see a lot of these communities come and go. The only thing I find a little alarming is the hype that surrounds them. If the open source community wants to jump in, great and if not, great. Frankly I don't see the difference. Maybe after the hype has died down some of these sites will have hit on something substantial that can be wrapped into the kind of utility generally provided by the developer community, but until then all I see is a series of social and commercial experiments that frankly aren't that gripping helping people find something on the net.
Quack, quack.
There are probably other FOSS projects to create a truly decentralized, federated social-networking and collaboration package, but the one I'm intimately familiar with is
OpenQabal. OQ is all about developing social-networking and collaboration software that puts users in control of their own information (including the much mentioned "social graph"), supports identity federation, and facilitates distributed conversations. Development is just getting started, but we're working off of a couple of existing code-bases to get a headstart.
Disclaimer: I'm the originator, chief architect and, so far, sole developer on the project, so everything I say may be considered biased, slanted, unreliable, or whatever else your skeptical little heart pleases.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
And sadly, those of us who are involved programmers in the FOSS community aren't social enough to have a Facebook profile.
/* No Comment */
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...
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
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
/etc/init.d/net.social stop
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.
The "obvious" approach for an Open Source solution is to have a core component that is fairly generic, fairly light, permits data exchange between sites no matter how they specialize, and permits plug-ins to enable that specialization. (There's no shortage of object exchange and data exchange protocols, so I really can't think of anything in the core component that couldn't be slapped together from pre-existing Open Source code.)
You want something that's generic, because you want a reason for people to use the Open Source solution besides politics. If a person can totally customize their space to suit the specific sort - or sorts - of social networking they want to do, then you have a reason. Instead of maintaining one account for each and every type of social networking you want to do, you have one account, one repository and an infinite ways to tailor and filter it for each social circle you're interested in.
I really can't see anybody really leaping onto Facebook II or MySpace II - if they wanted to do social networking, they'd already have accounts on the originals. The only reason anyone might want a new system is if it can do something the existing systems can't. One thing the existing systems can't do is share data. Another thing they can't do is be polymorphic. Ergo, those are the two things a FOSS social networking site would need to do to offer anything new and exciting.
Would that be enough, though? Probably not. Hence the plugins, to allow users to include webapps and other features. Each user would then be able to do more than just include photographs and text.
Again, would this be enough? No idea. It would have novelty and personalizability, but it may be so flexible that it's unusable, people may be getting burned out on such networks, and existing systems have the edge just by being there first.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
sometimes, privacy is of secondary importance
a good example being: you just provided one above, thanks
a lot of people, slashdot being hotbed of such privacy fundamentalists, are of this weird hyperactive hysterical panic over every privacy transgression: showing your receipt when you leave a store, cameras in the innercity, etc.
in their mind, they can't balance some prudent, common sense situations where, frankly, your privacy doesn't matter. at all
privacy is AN issue to consider on complex topics. it is not THE issue. sometimes, privacy is the most important concern. and other times, privacy ranks lower in importance than other concerns. like before you get on an airplane. there are people in this world who want to blow up airplanes. therefore, people have to submit to privacy intrusions before getting on airplanes. beginning and end of story
but you listen to some people, and it's like the second coming of hitler, the shocktroops of a new fascism. well yeah, if you got your social education from a comic book and you are a paranoid schizophrenic, i guess
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In anyone's life there are hundreds or thousands of people that know you, but with whom your relationship doesn't rank quite high enough to merit weekly or even monthly e-mails or phone calls. That doesn't mean you wouldn't like to keep track of them, where they are, or what they're doing.
A small business may have a similar group of people who they would like to keep track of as potential customers, or who would want to know what the business is up to. Again, not your prime customers, but that second tier of interested people that a sole proprietor doesn't have time to keep in touch with.
With Facebook you can add two or three hundred "friends" and with no further effort see on a daily basis what at least some of them are doing in their lives. They choose to Opt-in, so you can e-mail them your news without worries about backlash, and since they choose what information to display to you, you get a pretty nice picture of what matters in their lives.
Probably two thirds of the friends that I have in Facebook are people (including relatives) that I would never otherwise be in touch with.
Plus, you can turn all of these people into Vampires.
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Three Squirrels
Alright, I have a facebook account, and I have tons of friends, and now I come to Slashdot or some other site. I want to find out which of my friends are user of Slashdot too and I want to be able to add them into my social network in Slashdot, I want Slashdot's People modifier to work as it should without doing lots of work. I want to able to manage my network not only from Facebook but also from Slashdot, I want to find new friends through friends of friends or connection graph inside Slashdot, I want to add those friends in Slashdot and update the connection automatically to Facebook too.
I have a blog on Blogger, but I don't want to import my social network into my Google account. I want to let only my friends to post comment to my blog, but my friends don't have Google account or don't want to create or import his/her social network to Google. I want Blogger to be able to verify some anonymous to be actually my friends before allowing to post comment.
I have a Friendster account and I like Friendster more. I have some friends who only use Friendster and some friends who only use Facebook. I want my network to be synchronized within these 2 social network manager, and when I visit other site like Slashdot, I want to be able to import the 2 or more networks automatically.
I have a group of high school friends in Facebook and our group decides to create a new website. The group is well managed and controlled by ensuring everyone in the group know each other and are from the same school. Our new website want to be able to allow registration only from this group of people, so we want a verification system from Facebook between our website and our group.
I don't want to let everybody know who is my friend and how I connected to other people. I don't want to put what FOAF file on my website and let any people mine my private network information. I want to keep my social graph private and only available to my friends and sites I use, and I want authentication based on the social network. When I visit other sites like Slashdot, I don't want to tell Slashdot who are all the friends I have, I only want Facebook to find out from Slashdot that which are my friends are also using Slashdot and return the subset of list of friends. Social network should be private and it is very important to not expose it completely to public.
This is what the things that is needed, not what fancy profile or what superpoke application. With the power of a distributed social graph, alot of powerful things can be done. Other than that, privacy is IMPORTANT and should be always kept in mind. For this to work I have an architecture in mind and I think I should write on my blog now to share with you. Nevertheless, your direction is correct and I like this idea, lets do it together and make it a better social web!
It might be easy for you to make a website about yourself, and then other people who know you could perhaps google for your name and find it and know what you are up to. However, most people really really can't or would never do a website of themselves, or buy a domain name, or start a blog. And if you had a lot of friends who did, you wouldn't really check their blogs regularly, and you wouldn't bookmark fifty different website that may or may not change addresses to keep track of those people. And if they're the kind that don't have their own website, they would NEVER ever find yours. So you remain disconnected.
Facebook, like most other social networking sites, lets you find and connect with people you know. However, Facebook does a few things differently and better, which is why it's such a big success right now.
First, people use their real names. There are no "usernames" or other shit I'm supposed to know about people. Instead, they just use their real ones, which makes it a helluva lot easier to find people. I have a few friends who, like me, sign up to every social networking site just to check out the features, to see where the market is going, and we all noted something special about Facebook, we found a lot more friends and acquaintances than we have ever done on other sites. I reconnected and talked to old, old friends I haven't seen in 15 years. That's awesome.
Second, Facebook is actually tighter than most similar sites, since you can only really see people that are your friends, or are in the same network as you. This actually makes a lot of sense, since the absolute majority of users are not interesting to me and vice versa. There's a small subset of users I'm interested in, and I really couldn't care about the rest. If the irrelevant users are shoved out of my way, I can focus on the ones that are interesting.
Third, Facebook has internal feeds so that I can get to know, at a glance, what my friends are doing. Most of the people I've added are people I speak to pretty rarely, I would probably never email them or call them and ask how their lives are, but now, I get a little feed of it straight to my facebook homepage. Relationships starting or ending, babies born, travels done, where people work, what people do. It's ok if most only update their stuff every month, I get a slow trickle of interesting events.
Fourth, Facebook Apps allows every user to customize Facebook into what THEY like to do online, it's customized stickiness. If I want to compare movie-tastes with my friends, send funny links, find old classmates, find old colleagues, play web games, or a lot of other stuff, I don't need to get my friends to sign up to a different website for each of those functions, we can do it all on Facebook via different Apps.
Once communities begin to evolve around services like AIM they become very deeply entrenched. There are 47 million reasons to chose Facebook over its FOSS alternative.
Centralization may distress the Geek, but it makes it relatively easy to monitor abuse, set parental controls, license media content and so on.