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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."
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
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.
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.
/etc/init.d/net.social stop
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!
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.