Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I just idle on IRC instead.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ideally, it'd work something like this:
If you must microblog, Twitter is fine, or find something else. Most of them can publish to other accounts, and all of them worth considering will have at least an RSS feed, if not SMS.
Otherwise, pick any free blog hosting site, or run it yourself. Blogs already provide the basics of what "social networks" do, especially if you use XFN, but even without that, what do you really do on Facebook? Announce your status, post what you're doing, reply to other people's posts ("write on their wall"), organize events (iCal works, and Google Calendar supports it), link to people you like, follow what people are doing (RSS)... ...it's possible I'm missing what social networking is about, as I don't use Twitter or Facebook, but I also don't get what it adds above the Web itself as a medium. About the only thing I can think of is automatically suggesting certain people you might know, friends-of-friends and such, but I'm guessing anything that could provide that would also provide the exact same privacy concerns.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The only way to win...is to not play.
Seriously, that's the best way to stay out of the Social Media Black Hole. Don't log in. Don't make an account. EVER. Ignore the temptation. Ignore the appeal.
To me telling strangers or vague people everything all the time is giving up my privacy. If people are interested, they can ask me and perhaps I answer, but I just do not see the point to give out information all the time for no apparent reason.
Perhaps there are people who had a diary when they where young. It was to write to yourself, not so much to show others. And then suddenly you are older, moved a few times and re-read them. It is then that you notice how uninteresting it all is.
So if you want have people get in contact with you, set up a web page and let them google you like you google them. And if they only look on Facebook, then they are interested in adding a friend to get as many as possible, not about finding you.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Sure, Mark Zuckerberg's a douchebag, but most large corporations are run by douchebags and yet I still buy Cheerios at WalMart and drive a Chrysler.
Here's the thing - and don't tell anybody I told you this - if you don't put anything private on Facebook, then your privacy won't be compromised by it.
I use Facebook. I use it because most of my friends are on it. It's a nice way to stay in touch with people who I know, but most of whom I couldn't finish a single beer with and still have anything to talk about. I like these folks - they're part of my past and present - bu some people I only have very small things in common with. I also know when things are happening (a friend's play, or their kids league championship ball game), and where I have common interests with acquaintances whom I would either not interact with at all, or would take years to become closer.
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. I never Facebook while drunk (well, I don't get drunk - but you get the idea), and I don't attack people or things. I don't join "causes". I'm not a marketing wasteland, though. I've filled out my "favorite" things sections. BFD. If knowing that I'm in my 40s, like Bowling for Soup and Amadeus, and am married gets Facebook a couple of dollars in ad revenue, go for it. Kroger already knows when I'm on a fucking Diet, and CVS probably informs their spies when the rest of my household has seasonal allergies.
So, that brings me back - unless you really need something else, and are willing and able to migrate your entire friend group to it - quit your whining, be smart with your data, and surf with due caution. You know you can't trust Zuckerberg, and that's 98% of the way to keeping your information safe.
Oh - and whatever you go to will be just as bad eventually. Google can't always not be evil, and even open source projects can have a mole.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Will it eventually be possible to have a social-networking standard so that anyone can run their own server, just as with email? In that case it wouldn't matter if one friend uses facebook, another myspace, a third linkedin; they would all adhere to the same standard and so which particular social-networking service you use would become irrelevant.
PS: I apologize for being lazy but I haven't thought about this at all, so there could easily be some glaring reason why it can't possibly work.
is that counting birthday cards or no? If you've never gotten one piece of legitimate, personal snail mail then I pitty you. But, as my sister says, 'write a letter to get a letter'. She's big on real mail... and emily post. Marriage has ruined her punk-rockitude. :-/
Doug Stanhope on Why Your Opinion Doesn't Matter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RycwYRcm3Lc
You reject Buzz as a social network (quite reasonably) because it's not popular enough and then solicit suggestions for an even more obscure social network?
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
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...
I hate talking on a cellphone. I don't know why, but talking without visual feedback is annoying.
After face to face talking (which isn't an option in many cases, obviously), I tend to prefer IM. Video calls would be OK if they didn't have perceptible lag.
Dilbert RSS feed
Well, I was on the 14th floor...
This is the exact strategy I've taken. I registered http://myrealnamehere.com/ and started a blog. I'll be deleting my facebook account shortly, with my last post being "Anyone who actually cares what I'm up to, find out here" with a link to the site.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
This is/was the problem with instant messaging networks: Unless you were on the right network, along with your friends, you got nothing.
The solution that's quickly gaining ground is federated XMPP, where your identity is tied to a server, but the server can talk to other servers, so you're not stuck in one walled off garden.
Any outlook for good federated, multi-server, distributed and de-centralized social networking? I know there's status.net, where interesting stuff is happening...
The main feature of Facebook seems to be friend suggestions. How to manage the friend graph without the central server could be a challenge...
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
When social networks first started to appear, I didn't see the appeal. But I'm starting to understand it now.
The things people do on social network sites have been around as long as the Internet; it's just that the modern way of doing them is a bit more convenient.
Suppose my wife and I go out and ride a bicycle event (such as the annual ride from Seattle to Portland) and have a great time. My wife will probably write up an email about it, and send it to a list of our friends and relatives. She has to maintain that list and keep it up to date, and people who aren't on it might never find out about it, even if they would love to read about what we are doing.
The alternative is that she could post it on Facebook or some other site. She could set the privacy settings so that only our friends can see it. Facebook automatically starts helping friends find each other, so over time more and more friends are automatically able to see the posting. And, like a blog, it's also an archive old old posts, so newly added friends can go back and read older items they missed (if they so choose).
Once I realized that Facebook is actually a better way to send out these sort of updates, I started to like it a bit more.
Like anything else, it can be overdone. You might think it is very entertaining to say "I'm eating a sandwich right now" but I doubt I'd agree.
And I don't recommend sharing lots of really personal information: an example today I heard is that some person might say "Man, I really hate my boss" and then his/her boss might find the page and read that comment! Likewise, if you like to go to parties where people drink giant vats full of beer, and/or smoke strange things, you probably don't want to post photos of yourself at those parties; and you don't want to post things like "man I'm so wasted ive got the munchies so bad 4:20 ha ha." Later, possibly even years later, you might be applying for a job someplace and the new company might decline you just because of those wild and crazy public updates.
Another thing to consider: there is a horrible amount of spam in normal email (about 95% of all email sent is spam!). Some people are increasingly relying on social networking sites to communicate: instead of group-emailing their friends, they just update their micro-blogs; instead of sending an email to a friend, they just use the chat feature. Personally, I am very offended that spammers are breaking email for the rest of us, and I don't want to see everyone retreat into walled gardens owned by corporate overlords; I'd like to see a proper fix for email. But nonetheless, there are some people who rarely or never bother to check their email, but check their social page many times a day.
I think in the near future, we will see a great convergence: you will use one client that will alert you to instant messages, emails, personal messages from social networking sites, updates to your friends' micro-blogs, and RSS/Atom feed updates. You will be able to reply via instant message, email, personal message, or updating your micro-blog, or updating your blog if you have one. People don't really care what the transport is underlying the messages; why do we need one client for instant messages, another one for email, another one for social network sites, and another one for RSS/Atom? (One of the selling points for Google Buzz is that it is knitted together with your Gmail.) I would love a super-aggregator, where I could get it to alert me if a message is really urgent or from someone really important, and where other messages would just queue up for my later perusal.
P.S. Two clients:
Ubuntu 10.04 includes a social networking client called Gwibber. It aggregates all social networks for you, and can color-code messages to help you keep track (like, blue messages were pulled from Facebook, but red messages came from Twitter, etc.). You can post an update, and it will automatically push it out to multiple services (Facebook, Twitter,
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
good luck with that. watch your server logs so you can be crushed by how few of your "friends" will bother leaving the comfort of their facebook pages to bother checking your blog. you can believe your bucking the trend, but your really just ostracising yourself
The people I know who are most active in Facebook are also the people that don't miss a Uni party, know almost everybody in their course and are never at home at Saturday nights.
The people that have small profiles are the ones who have a more restricted circle of friends and less time/will to go out.
Same here. Those are the social butterflies. Sadly, I never developed that skill and just feel awkward at parties and gatherings and compensate by randomly saying inappropriate things.
In fact, that was the best part of smoking. It gave me an excuse to walk out of a party for a few minutes. I am quitting smoking, but will continue to use that as an excuse.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I am curious how many other slashdotters starts to feel physically sick and anxious at parties?
Hell, I get anxious and as a result a little angry just when talking to an overly friendly co-worker.
Caucus is mainly aimed at educational institutions. For something more like facebook, you probably want Boonex or Elgg.
I'm nearly 60 [although most of my life has been spent with computers], I hated Facebook from inception, it 'felt' shallow and stupid and something that made friendship a commodity. Also I didn't [and don't] like the constantly changing privacy and ownership 'landscape'.
So, since I have a green agenda, I've helped a group in East London implement an Elgg instance for my fellow greenies: http://www.hackney-environment-network.org.uk/ like a credit union, mamy of these people have a common bond with myself.
I'm hoping that these smaller and sometimes subject oriented groupings may be part of the social network future. A missing piece is an ethical, open-source, privacy preserving consolidator though. One reason I chose Elgg was for the 'promise' of OpenSocial: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
On y va, qui mal y pense!
http://www.classy.dk/log/archive/001074.html
I've been thinking of something along this very line, but I'm a little torn: distributed is the right way to go, but to implement something akin to the facebook newsfeed, it seems like the right answer is an atom feed that all your friends subscribe to (and you to theirs), but then either you have something downloading theirs all the time, and then your info is stored on someone else's computer where it's easy pickings for a bot (and the opportunities for exposure multiplied), or you wait to fetch all 100+ friends' feeds. I'm not sure if the risk of the former is *that* big, after all, it wouldn't be hard for a bot to get the facebook login and skim all the info, but it would be rather harder than just picking off the local cache.
Building an distributed network on top of HTTP protocols (atom) will lead to privacy problems... It seems necessary to have a server-side support that will also implement some privacy policies which would allow you to define who gets access to which post. Also, the only way to get real time updates is by some polling, which may be resource intensive...
Using XMPP (Jabber) as a base for some kind of distributed social network seems to me like a better idea to me... It is still distributed, you can run your own server that will host your posts and will push all the updates to those subscribed, implement some privacy rules...
There is already a project that tries to do something like that: http://onesocialweb.org/
I good friend of mine realised this to their horror, after a political crackdown started, and they were in facebook, tagged next to several people on the hit-list. I suggested that they kill their account by posting their login and password. Viola, account compromised and not a legal liability. You can honestly say 'anyone could have done it'.....
Waiting for the other shoe to...