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Best Alternatives To the Big Name Social Media?
rueger writes "Over a couple of years I have actually found Facebook pretty useful and/or entertaining. It has certainly allowed me to stay connected with a lot of people with whom I otherwise would have lost track, and for all its weaknesses it was handy for sharing links and such. This week, though, the privacy escapades have pushed me (and a lot of other people) over the edge. If Twitter's 140 characters aren't enough, LinkedIn is too business-oriented, MySpace too ugly, and Buzz — does anyone even use Buzz? What social media options are out there for all of those non-uber-techy folks?"
Ob PA: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
It's all I ever think about every time twitter is covered by the popular media or NPR or whatever. And it unnerves me tremendously that I can't twack the anchor with a wet trout wrapped in a printout of that comic.
LinkedIn is useful for business purposes. LinkedIn offers a big hammer that discourages spammers. If someone tries to "friend" you, and you don't know them, you click "I don't know this person". After a few rejections, the annoying user loses the ability to "friend" people. The same goes for "questions"; if someone puts up a question that looks like spam, and it's flagged, they soon lose the ability to post "questions". As a result, there are people on LinkedIn worth talking to. However, a big fraction of the users are "consultants" trolling for work. Lots of lawyers, but, after all, lawyers are consultants trolling for work.
I used to enjoy Tribe, which was fun and useful if you're near SF, because many of the people doing interesting art things in SF were on Tribe. But they have near zero traffic now. A few years back, they went "Web 2.0", and they broke their system so badly that "Tribe bug reports" became the most active group. Then they decided to crack down on "adult" topics to please their advertisers, and a big chunk of their user base left. Then they annoyed their main developer, and he left. After those mistakes, I think they're down to about three employees.
IRC is a vacuum through which sanity slowly escapes the brain. It is proliferated by sociopathic assholes and the occasional psychopath off his medication. If you want a really good example of what happens when you let the lunatics run the asylum, IRC is it. And the worst part is, even well-meaning people who come there get sucked into its cyber-bullying, cynical norm and either succumb to it or get the hell out... leaving only the most warped idiots to argue amongst themselves.
Super super super early stage, but very interesting is Diaspora. This open source project aims to create a completely decentralized social network. It's inspired by Eben Moglen's call for us to break out of the walled gardens.
While walled gardens aren't going away, I really hope this project is at least partially successful giving people back control of their own data.
There's Tumblr, Jaiku, LiveJournal, 4chan...
Or alternatively, you could do your own research.
Check out the free and open source software, Caucus and build your own social network. I belong to such a Caucus-based community, where invited members can speak openly, and I strongly agree that Facebook is seriously limited by privacy concerns.
You could also look up "The Well" and see what communities of a similar nature are out there. Seems you're looking for something like that.
Identi.ca uses it, and I think the purpose is for people across different social networking sites to be able to follow each other.
Found it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging
This would ostensibly lead to a decentralization of social networking sites while still allowing people to discover other users.
I guess I came across as somewhat facetious in my original message. Yet, I was only semi-joking and still stand by my message.
Visit a local community center, join a neighbourhood committee, take the dog for a walk, join your local friends for coffee, tea, lunch, movies, etc. I know enough people that've eschewed their real social lives for their web 2.0 social "life". Given the lack of privacy, the identity theft or targeting, and the sheer waste of time (how much of the time you spend on Facebook is spent solely on communicating rather than simply advertising the details of your life or, even worse, playing honeypot "games"?)
As for friends 5000+ miles away, there're plenty of IM clients for that!
So does Blogger, so I'm still not seeing it...
...though I do see the point. It would be nice if there was a one-stop solution that actually incorporated all of the above, without the obscene lock-in. (Also without the data-mining, though it doesn't really matter so much at that point -- if you can migrate to another host and take your network of friends with you, I'd hope competition would make these networks care a bit more about privacy.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Yes, you appear to be right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Psychopathy_vs._sociopathy
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
~ Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, xvi (1657)
[I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.]
Tried that - they won't let me change my age to under 18 because people under 18 aren't allowed to make changes like that. Or something.
Three Squirrels
Facebook has a really bad rap in web communities that dealing with marital infidelity. All this great tech lets wandering spouses get one of those "just like the good old days" hook ups with past lovers, let alone new "adult friends"
To me telling strangers or vague people everything all the time is giving up my privacy.
I lived in a small "population center" of 1200 people once, for about 8 months. It was living hell. Nothing you did - NOTHING - was private, and half of what you did do was misconstrued into something else entirely different. If the wrong person didn't like you, the most vicious rumors would spill out. It didn't matter if it was true; I know quite a few people were forced out of town on threat of fraudulent criminal charges, and heard suggestive rumor that the same thing was "in the works" to happen to me.
Since that time, I've been very, very protective of my privacy. Rumors in a small community can ruin a person, and your reputation is paramount in the business world to success (regardless of actual merit). As such, I'm careful about what it is I actually broadcast as "me".
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You have never lived in a small town, have you? As the new person, if you are friendly then you must be hiding something. If you are quiet, you are hiding something. If you talk to people, you are trying to blend in and are hiding something. 1200 people, you might meet 100 in the first week, but the other 1100 will have heard about you from their friends and family. I grew up in a town only a bit larger, under 5000 people, and when someone new moved to town people would know their favorite ice cream flavor before they ever met them. New people being those not already kin to one of the three or four families, or marrying into one of those families.
Okay, so my perspective is from a small southern town. Maybe them yankees do it differently.
Remember this really crazy time between 1933 and 1945, where a small group of people could terrorize a huge group, because most people did bend over and take it?
Yeah. That one.
Q.E.D.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
But guess what - I don't put anything on Facebook which is (a) embarrassing (b) particularly personal (c) not already available with an internet search.
It's not necessarily what personal info you put on Facebook that's going to come back to bite you in the ass; it's your social network itself. Back in the 1950s, during the McCarthy witchhunt, you got into trouble not so much for what you did, but for who you associated with (or even were just seen talking to). At that point you had the choice of either denouncing that person or being blacklisted yourself. As an aspiring dictator, I drool profusely thinking about how easily I'll be able to cleanse the social landscape of it's undesirable elements. They're falling all over themselves trying to give me lists of all their friends, no housecalls or torture needed.
Of course, it can't happen here, falling on deaf ears, etc...
And the facebook privacy changes back in december have made your list of friends public information. Read those policies folks: you can remove the list of friends from your profile so they don't show (or restrict it to friends only, etc), but they're still considered public by facebook. This means they can give it to whomever they want, and already provide it to any application a friend of yours may be using.
A couple years ago about fifty slashdot journalers moved over there en masse, and have generally had few (but nonzero*) reasons to regret it.
For an opposing perspective, I went to Multiply solely because the rest of the circle did, and I wholeheartedly regret it. While it certainly has potential, and the richer media is clearly an improvement, it's very buggy, and it's a pain in the arse to use. I frequently end up pointing people to my journal on LJ, simply because I can't work out how to beat Multiply around the head enough to get it to post the content I want. The HTML editor is a joke. Embedding video in a blog (as opposed to Multiply's default copyright infringing "video import" mode) is painful. The friend system is confusing ("friends-only" posts aren't available to certain types of friend). Never seen banhammer problems, but the ongoing problems with the rest of the site make me wish the circle had chosen a better home (LJ, for instance, which has its own faults, but never seems to get in the way of me posting what I want -- which Multiply does).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Crabgrass is a pretty unique social networking utility. It is maintained by the folks over at riseup.net, and is free software. Since it is done by the riseup folks, you know it is built with privacy and security in mind... http://we.riseup.net/