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.

Comments

A personal architecture for private communications

[alexandre]

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 ...

Re:We have it. It's called the World Wide Web.

[timeOday]

Centralized, proprietary services are gradually displacing standards on the web - web boards over usenet, twitter over IRC, gmail over email, hulu and youtube over (innumerable generations of filesharing protocols from ftp to bittorrent).

And on a larger scale, we have highly proprietary mobile devices (foremost Apple) displacing PCs altogether.