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A Call For an Open, Distributed Alternative To Facebook
qwerty8ytrewq writes "Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, claims that Facebook has gone rogue: 'Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. ... And Facebook realized it owned the network. Then Facebook decided to turn "your" profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.' Singel goes on to call for an open, distributed alternative. 'Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish. Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking.' Can Slashdotters predict where social networking is going? And how?"
Relatedly, jamie points out a graphical representation of how Facebook's privacy settings have changed over the last five years.
With this so-called "World Wide Web", you can create your own web page, showing exactly the information you wish to reveal about yourself. You can show a profile picture, your name, your location, your birthday, your likes and interests, any pictures you want to share, any movies you want to share, and so forth. You can even change the appearance of it to suit your own tastes!
You can use something called a guestbook that'll allow other people to leave messages for you, and you can use other people's guestbooks to leave messages for them.
It's not related to the World Wide Web, but you can use something called "e-mail" to send a private message to a specific recipient, and they can even reply back to you!
Maybe this "World Wide Web" technology will catch on some day.
What's the issue you are complaining about here? Everyone knows that everything in facebook is public, we know it from the very beginning, and it's been years that we know how evil they are. Why don't you just post content on your personal website were you can control everything? I can't see ANY of the things you do with Facebook that you wouldn't be able to do with instant messengers and a web server.
Facebook is not compulsory.
With a name like that, it's doomed to fail.
a suite of protocols and formats have been developed over the years to achieve this. look for the Data Portability movement for one or the largest groupings of like minded folk, although the dev action is fairly distributed.
the current two interesting things to watch is the development of OAuth 2, for distributed apps, which will help with the sharing of the various open standards of profile information and the like, and the Google Buzz method of using Salmon and PubSubHubbub to aggregate comments to an article.
i'm looking forward to being able to connect WordPress, Drupal, etc, sites together to aggregate community content.
MilkMiruku
The intersection of
set of people who use facebook
and the set of people who care about open computing
is essentially the null set.
I totally agree with replacing Facebook with a new, open alternative that respects privacy. And we can start by removing the "Like" button from TFA.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
And switch from farmville to what similar game?
Start with an ant farm, move up to a fish tank and maybe someday, just maybe, we'll get you a puppy.
The essence of a social networking site is that it is social - a gathering place that draws a critical mass of users.
Most like that sense of connection - and almost none of them are geeks.
"Think of being able to buy your own domain name... Broadcast{ing to) your micro-blogging service of choice."
They aren't thinking that at all.
The value of a social network is proportional to the number of members it has. Facebook started in 2004 aimed at students, grew for a while, and in 2006 opened membership to everyone. It was two years after that (and two years ago) when Facebook exceeded Myspace, and it's just been pulling ahead since. It's now blown away any previous social network scale now. If you started tomorrow with a compelling site people might use instead of Facebook--the same way that Facebook was a compelling improvement over Myspace--best case it would be two years before you'd even have a shot of being popular enough to be considered a viable alternative here. The unfortunate reality here is that making this sort of site available to most people for free costs somebody money, and that will never go on forever without somebody trying to make a buck. Social networks trying to expand are practically forced into it just to pay for their overhead as popularity increases.
As for the privacy issues, I never told Facebook anything private in the first place; anybody who did is a fool. I didn't care that they were throwing ads in my face that were obviously targeted to interests I listed in my profile to make ad dollars; expected that, all part of getting the site for free, and things like my music/movie likes are quite public information already. But last week when I visited cnn.com to read a news story, and it magically showed me what news stories my Facebook friends had been looking at (and presumably exposing what I was doing to them), that was the point where I felt myself that Facebook had gone rogue. Time to use UnFuck Facebook and crank up the rest of my hostile site defenses now. Facebook I'm now treating like a link that might lead to p0rn: I might still go there if because it's fun sometimes to look at, but I won't be adding to their ad income and I expect the site to be hostile. And I'll go out of my way to avoid all the sites they're selling my info to as well.
..for me and I never really understood this bitching about privacy - if I post something (on facebook or pretty much anywhere on the internet) I expect that it is public. If it's posted to "friends only" it's still public. Honestly, if you have a secret and tell it to your 100-200 or so "friends", is it reasonable to expect that no one else will hear it? No, there are only two levels: "private" (don't post) and public. The misstake of facebook was to pretend otherwise, so now people seem to think they have a God-given right to intermediate privacy levels that logically can't exist since you can't really stop individuals from spreading whatever you give them.
There are at least four groups trying to do this. Can't they at least get together to agree on how the standards that get us 95% of the way there (OpenID, ActivityStrea.ms, etc.) get glued together, then go work on their code? We don't need four or five competing, incompatible standards trying to get uptake from the massive monopoly that is Facebook.
Put identity in the browser.
Ryan goes on to say "Setting up a decent system for controlling your privacy on a web service shouldn't be hard.". I'd disagree. It's tremendously difficult. Creating interfaces and a data model for managing these settings is very difficult. Implementing it is a pain as well. From a coder perspective, I find this kind of work the least rewarding around. And Ryan actually admits to this saying "the whole system is maddeningly complex.". I rather think Facebook did a decent job with the current set of options.
Perhaps it is complex to implement all these controls. That seems like a red herring when people are complaining about previously working privacy settings being removed or changed. It wasn't too difficult to have those settings in 2005.
The problem for many people is that Facebook keeps removing controls that were previously implemented. The history of Facebook is not one of saying, "Gee, we wish we could implement all these privacy settings you'd like"; it is one of saying, "Gee, you're not really going to miss those privacy settings we are removing, are you?"
Maybe that's because you have no clue of how OpenID works... How does Microsoft get to know what's going on when I use my Google OpenID to sign into StackOverflow, pray tell?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It doesn't have to be a centralized server, it can be federated, like XMPP severs (you can talk to Google Talk/Gmail IM users without having an account in Google's server, for example).
Dilbert RSS feed
Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader.
Used to? What, it no longer serves that function?
It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members.
And still is.
And Facebook realized it owned the network.
ZOMG1!!! I think there is a very strong possibility that Facebook *knew* they owned the thing that runs on their f* infrastructure. Maybe that was part of their business model from day one. Crazy I know!!!
Even crazier to think they just realized that fact </facepalm>
Then Facebook decided to turn "your" profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves.
See above.
Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking.
Yeah, I can see the typical Facebook user (or the typical consumer of web-based information and publication in general) doing just that. This is what happens when geeks project their own experience and worries onto others, thinking others do as they do, and most importantly, care or worry about the same shit they do. They don't.
If such a proposal ever takes place, all it would do is facilitate the creation of new "facebooks" that will wither and die over time. Eventually people will conglomerate to specific venues with functionality and ethos that appeal to them, run not by a collective of selfless enthusiast but by people who put the time and money to make it happen (and that won't happen just out of charity.)
Talking about missing the entire point of human communication.