Slashdot Mirror
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.
We need to have a project that aims to unite all the privacy projects out there to make something good come out of it, using the power of the crowd with free software in a privacy respecting matter but in a much more powerful way that can actually serve people...
Here are some projects or ideas that deserves to be noticed:
An openID with privacy features:
http://openprivacy.org/
P2P social networks / research:
http://www.movim.eu/
http://www.peerson.net/
P2P search:
http://yacy.net/
P2P SIP:
http://www.blyon.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/22/p2p-sip-uri-dialing/
Encryption:
http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
P2P encrypted networks:
http://www.i2p2.de/
http://freenetproject.org/
Augmented reality / group mapping:
http://www.openillusionist.org.uk/documentation/doku.php?id=site:home
http://www.biomapping.net/
Mesh:
http://robin-mesh.wik.is/
I envision a setup where our cell phones or little home servers (open ones, like the n900 or better) can connect to each other via mesh, have open social infrastrcture running on them routed over an I2P layer so nobody knows who is talking to who and you have total control as to who/when/what is seen by your peers.
These setup have cameras that can use such network to create massive collaborative networks to document a situation or location. Be it a manifestation where you relay real time camera from all angles with sound level maps and other sensors to augmented reality group interaction and other crazy ideas.
This is more broad that what is discussed here as it touches all OSI layers and ask for a shift toward a p2p infrastructure at all level respecting and working for the user and independance from middle man as much as we can. ...
Of course a distributed DNS might have to be worked on too. I think these research are fundamental to the survival of freedom online as we knew it
And on a larger scale, we have highly proprietary mobile devices (foremost Apple) displacing PCs altogether.
Who controls the data you enter into an OpenID account?
I do. I'm not sure OpenID works they way you think it does.
I think you've got it completely wrong.
My wife talks to her parents on facebook more than she does her friends from highschool.
The paradigm of communications and interactions on facebook are fundamentally different from the hand written letter, from the phone call, from the email, from the text message, from the face-to-face one on one, and from the hanging out in a physical space.
People use facebook differently to communicate than they use all of those things.
They are not looking to invent new technologies to segment themselves from prior generations. It's not like kids have STOPPED texting because of facebook.
Compare the attributes of various communications mechanisms. Single-cast vs. Multi-cast. Real-time interactive vs. store-and-forward. Immediate feedback vs. delayed feedback. Error-correction deferred response vs. errors sent in-band. Persisted by default vs. volitile by default. Single-media vs. multi-media. Collaborative response vs. isolated response.
Facebook has different attributes vs. a phone call, an email, an SMS, hanging out in person, etc. People use it differently.
For instance, there is no way for a kid to use a phone to do a 1:many broadcast of 5 lines of text of how they are feeling _right now_, and to get group-visible/collaborative responses on a time-disparate basis. (well, unless their phone can update facebook -- which many can).
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Who controls the data you enter into an OpenID account?
I do. I'm not sure OpenID works they way you think it does.
I'm not even sure how OpenID works. I regularly read the blog entries for MAKE Magazine. One day they switched their commenting system credentials, and it says you can log in with OpenID. Oh, and another page somewhere says that if you've got an account with Google, you've got an OpenID. "Great!", I thought. Except I couldn't figure out how the hell to log in with my google/OpenID to the MAKE blog commenting system.
I'm a software professional. I research and dig through code all the time. I use my Google-fu to find answers. After an hour of surfing, I gave up trying to find the answer to HOW to use my Google acct as an OpenID and log in. I just abandoned the idea of contributing useful comments to the blog. I don't know whether to blame MAKE, OpenID, or myself for not researching for more than an hour.
(In fact, at the moment of this writing, http://www.openid.net/ is answering HTTP requests with some kind of incompete TGZ response content type. wtf?)
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.