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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry that is no longer available we have a new version that is not backwards compatible I believe it is called web 2.0 or possibly sucker net

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

[blai]

so how will you be controlling who sees what, unless you're planning to make everybody register on your site, which doesn't really work anyway?

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

[BradleyUffner]

so how will you be controlling who sees what, unless you're planning to make everybody register on your site, which doesn't really work anyway?

OpenID might work. There are already quite a few registrars that are pretty large, so odds are a lot of people already have an OpenID account and don't realize 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.

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

[zash.se]

Add http://onesocialweb.org/ and you have status updates and privacy control too!

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

[GPLHost-Thomas]

I thought that the issue with Facebook was that everything was public... Are you suddenly feeling like you got to be off-topic?

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

[jadrian]

Exactly! And then when you change your address on your web page, or add pictures, or some funny text or a video or something, all you have to do is to send these emails to all those people to notify them. Unless they don't want to, but just ask them and keep track of your friends preferences. And to avoid forgetting anyone keep them on an address book. And maybe add things like that guestbook but for commenting on pictures. And if you do parties and want to invite people you know just go to your address book, pick who you want, send emails, get reply and maybe take note of the friends that are going and post it on your webpage so your other friends can see which other friends are going. It would also be cool if your web page could have a blog that others could comment on.

This sounds like a bit of trouble but you get the hang of it, besides this WWW is quite powerful so I'm sure there's a way of using it to automate some pieces of this puzzle... and also put them together for people to use so that not everyone has to reinvent the wheel.

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

[Jurily]

But all that involves a lot of work. Facebook got popular because it made it easy.

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

[Roxton]

Facebook is useful because of its user base, its aggregation, and its API. Personal websites don't provide this.

Game theory problem.
Even if 90% of people wanted to switch to open protocols, there's no clear path from A to B.

In that scenario, you've got four choices:
1) Call that a tragedy and throw up your hands.
2) Be a douche canoe and mansplain how Libertarian ideology invalidates the desires of that 90%.
3) Call for government action.
4) Find some way to promote private collective bargaining.

This problem applies to a wide range of issues from DRM to ISP throttling to "developing" world exploitation.

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

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> You can show a profile picture, your name, your location, your birthday...
 
...your mother's maiden name, your Social Security Number, the name of your childhood pet, the CVD code from the back of your credit card, the dates and times you'll be out of the house, which drawer you keep your sex toys in, and other fun facts you'd like to share with your friends and family.

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

[icebraining]

How exactly are web boards more centralized and proprietary than IRC? There's plenty of servers and OSS implementations of them, like PHPBB.
And how is GMail a substitute for email? It's a closed email server, like others exist for at least 15 years.

If you're talking about IM in Gmail, then you're talking bollocks because it's based on XMPP, a standard, and many OSS clients can talk to the servers or you can even host your own.

As for Youtube/Hulu, try watching streaming video over bittorrent. It's not even the same type of service. In fact, Youtube is becoming *more open* because they depend on Flash but are starting to use HTML5, a real standard.

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

[Gerald]

Who controls the data you enter into an OpenID account?

I do. I'm not sure OpenID works they way you think it does.

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

[pushf popf]

so how will you be controlling who sees what, unless you're planning to make everybody register on your site, which doesn't really work anyway?

You can never control "who sees what."

If something is private, keep it off the net.

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

[badpazzword]

HTTP is still all the rage. GMail is still email. Twitter is not an IRC replacement. Youtube is also not an FTP replacement. Web boards are starting to get aged themselves.

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

[Runaway1956]

Now, THAT is cool! I love it! If we had huge smile smilies, I'd go emo on you, LMAO

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

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

With this so-called "World Wide Web", you can create your own web page, showing exactly the information you wish to reveal about yourself.

The value of Facebook isn't that you can publish your own information. It's that all these people are already there and easy to find.

It's a shame that all those people spent a mod point on your post without realizing that people used to do exactly what you said.

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

[timeOday]

How exactly are web boards more centralized and proprietary than IRC?

I said web boards are displacing usenet. Usenet wasn't controlled by any particular company that could fill it with spam or go out of business, it was (is) just a protocol for synchronizing content between servers

And how is GMail a substitute for email? It's a closed email server, like others exist for at least 15 years.

GMail is a substitute for email because the more people adopt it, the more it becomes a proprietary web-based messaging system, rather than a distributed, peer-to-peer system as email was originally envisioned. Yes, gmail still interoperates with everybody else's email, which is good. But for some significant fraction of emails with both originate and end on gmail, smtp, pop, and the millions of other email servers out there are irrelevant. It's not just the protocols involved that matter, the point is a huge fraction of people are on the same server/cloud/administrative domain.

Another step in the roping in of email was blacklists that blocked the majority of IP addresses on the Internet from originating mail. An even bigger step was the displacing of email by texting on cellphones. Show me the RFC describing how I can make my own texting client for my cellphone.

Of course, there were pretty good reasons for all of this, like spam. Digital anarchy failed. It's sad.

As for Youtube/Hulu, try watching streaming video over bittorrent. It's not even the same type of service.

Of course. Nothing is displaced by something just the same. Normally it is displaced by something better, at least better in some respect. Cars aren't quite the same as horse-drawn sleighs, either, but that's what displaced them.

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

[dgatwood]

Which makes this whole story rather pointless, don't you think?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the 2.0 Way(tm). Everything - websites, phones, desktop environments, programming languages - is expected to have special integration with Facebook, special integration with Twitter, etc, instead of using standard interfaces. If the 2.0-fags had designed the web to begin with, each site would use its own markup language and its own network protocol, and each would only be usable in its own special browser that runs on its own special operating system and its own special computer architecture.

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

[Vintermann]

I had to look up "douche canoe" and "mansplain", but I'm glad I did.

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

[Vintermann]

And why did it become that success? Because facebook denied you some privacy right away, namely the freedom to be there under a pseudonym. They may be asses in many ways, but they owe their success to showing people that sharing personal information can be useful, not just dangerous.

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

[flappinbooger]

You're missing the point - don't put that crap on there in the first place then you can't get mad if they reveal it w/o your permission.

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

[Kozz]

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?)

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

[tambo]

Maybe this "World Wide Web" technology will catch on some day.

Ah, but what did Facebook bring us over Geocities and personalized web pages?

• Standardized profiles - information is put in the same places on everyone's profiles
• Searchability - a very easy ability to find someone's profile by name, city, etc.
• Centralized news feeds - this is Facebook's killer app, really: the presentation of a single page featuring status updates by all of your friends, and the ability to handle status responses in a threaded manner
• Metadata - the ability to tag friends in photos (and have those photos aggregated into albums for each of your friends), to "like" statuses, to tag friends in notes and to republish others' notes, etc.
• The ability for non-technical users to create an account and an entire page in an extremely easy-to-use and non-technical way

And... well, that's about it, really. Other innovations (Facebook apps, in particular) are neither new nor particularly interesting or useful.

In exchange for these features, Facebook has imposed a whole swath of misuses and abuses, including (but hardly limited to):

• The privacy violations documented in the parent post
• Targeted advertising based on private information ("hey, I see you've written an email about a trip to Boston, here's an offer for a rental car while you're there...")
• Taking control of users' data (the inability to archive your profile, the heavy compulsion to use Facebook's (terrible!) email system, etc.)
• Extreme control over the arrangement of a user profile, either by the user or by a visitor... e.g., cluttering up the page with Facebook's advertising widgets and non-removable apps

In short - the social network and information delivery advantages that Facebook offers us are beginning to not be worth the costs that Facebook is extracting as the owner of that social network.

Yes, the author is right - we need a free, open, non-centralized alternative to Facebook.

Of course, it can't be a return to the Geocities model. We do need the advantages of Facebook - discoverability, standardization of information, message delivery, and a clean and easily prepared presentation. But requiring everyone to buy web space, learn HTML or a CMS, and design and deploy their own profiles is just not a viable solution.

So what do we need? I propose the following:

• A standardized personal information representation - probably an XML schema that holds all of a user's personal information in a standardized way. With the right renderer, the presentation of this information can end up looking exactly like Facebook's. But even better, the viewer of the information - i.e., the visitor of the user's profile - has complete control over the layout of this information, and can render it in a more pleasing way if desired. Better still, the standardization promotes automation - e.g., the automated synchronization of each user's contact information with your contact info database. (No more "my cell number changed, please update your records" email messages!)
• A centralized database with pointers to user profiles (e.g., to the XML files of various users posted at various points on the net.) This really needs to be *one* registry. However, it serves a very specific and narrow purpose: if you want to find the guy named Joe from Ypsilanti who you met at an event last week, it needs to point you to his representation (if it's public.)
• A security mechanism. Look, this one's much easier than anyone thinks. We've had RSA for over 20 years. Identifying certificates, and techniques for encrypting select pieces of information for access only by specified individuals, are quite well-conceived. We just need automated protocols that incorporate these techniques. If done well, this model vastly surpasses Facebook's security models - you have exquisite privacy control over *every* piece of information: ev

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

[AthanasiusKircher]

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!

Yes -- and this is something I really don't get about Facebook. Once in a while, I have received messages through Facebook from people I don't know very well and who may not know my e-mail address directly in their address book.

But the majority of the "private messages" I get through Facebook are from people I know very well and have exchanged many e-mails with -- often people I've corresponded with by e-mail within the past few months, if not the past few days. Generally, I just respond by e-mail. Why give Facebook access to private correspondence?

I of course realize e-mail isn't private and shouldn't be treated that way, but I have greater confidence that my normal e-mail provider won't deliberately publish the content of my private messages to the entire internet without cause (like a legal investigation)... unlike all the information on Facebook, whose privacy policy seems to get weaker on an almost weekly basis.

I guess I can understand how some people see Facebook as a general replacement for a lot of interaction over the internet, but the friends who do this aren't the type who spend hours every day on Facebook.

Why would you send a private message through a third-party service like this if there's a reasonable standard alternative?

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

[atisss]

You probably don't understand how OpenID works. And that's the problem about it (that most of people don't understand)

If You're not technically skilled, you can just use OpenID provider whom you trust most.
Or You can set up your own OpenID, so that You own control the identity.

However, if returning to topic - another problem for non-skilled would be creating your own webpage - choosing a hosting, setting it up, adjusting, linking all your friends, and finally getting notifications of what your friends are actually doing. Hard, but still possible..

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

[atisss]

I see a possible BBSpot news article here:

GMail locks down it's SMTP gateways. Because most of people are on GMail anyway, the rest of incoming messages are just spam. It's like facebook - you can send message to your friends, or anybody who's on gmail, but you shouldn't send it to yahoo. And so on.. :)

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

[Jugalator]

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!

... and the socialization? Eventually, you'll simply reinvent Facebook, and hope everyone else use your site.

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

[FatdogHaiku]

...or possibly sucker net

We'll re-title it to fucker net when the .xxx TDL goes live... although we should have just switched .org to stand for orgasm...

Back on topic, I like the idea of protocols for info, display/exchange. You could even build in some filtering so that people that want to share A LOT would not offend visitors that are flagged as "under age" or chose not to view provocative content. It would also subject the large companies to the same copyright restrictions they want to shove down the throat of everyone else. You own the data and are the publisher, by law you get to say how it may or may not be used.

That could get interesting.

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

[eugene ts wong]

Thank you for looking it up and saying that you did. It never occurred to me that I should do it. It turned out to be very funny. I appreciate it.

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

[erikbigelow]

Hey I've created a project we've released an alpha version that is an open decentralized social networking application called 6d (http://www.get6d.com). You should take a look. It's not easy and intuitive yet which is keeping it more on the underground for now, but it will let you connect with other sites using 6d as the framework. There are other projects out there too such as OneSocialWeb. The key will be to make sure there is interoperability between these decentralized projects.

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

[Mr2001]

An even bigger step was the displacing of email by texting on cellphones. Show me the RFC describing how I can make my own texting client for my cellphone.

How about source code?

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

[atrizzah]

Well, you could keep it private, if the organization that runs this website provided you with privacy options and acted in a trustworthy and ethical way to maintain these options. Apparently this is a big problem though

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

[Jane Q. Public]

Thanks for "mainsplaining", yourself. Actually, there are a lot more options than just those. In any of the areas you listed.

For just one example: Somebody could create a facebook-like site that doesn't blatantly violate privacy. And actually there are some out there already. It has always mystified me why so many gravitated to Facebook anyway. Its API is no big deal, and the site doesn't really offer me anything else that 100 other sites don't. The only unusual thing it has going for it is user base, which makes it valuable to other businesses, which is in fact the very thing that has driven compromise of privacy. And by the way: all my personal information in my Facebook account, except for my name, has ALWAYS been blank. Anticipating this privacy issue (especially after public statements by Zuckerberg in previous years) did not exactly take genius-level reflection.

Many solutions already exist. As long as you don't insist on being on the exact same site as 4 billion other people. And standards for interoperation between sites also already exist. And there is nothing preventing the formation of public APIs. It has been done in other areas.

So I don't see this as being such an exercise in Game Theory at all. Much less something that can be narrowed to just 4 options. The real solution is to illuminate, or create if necessary, that path from A to B. In this case it's already there. And it isn't in any of your 4 categories. That is just the Fallacy of a False Dichotomy, squared.

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

[Jane Q. Public]

I should also point out that massive popularity (Facebook's only real "unique" asset) and subsequent commercialization are ultimately what led to the mass exodus from MySpace.

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

[buchner.johannes]

Google Tech Talk about a "Persona Editor".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRoRMzE8Uc

Basically, the guy wants to free the content from social networks back to a desktop app (avoiding lockin and privacy issue). I don't think it'll be attractive to users.

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

[Rene S. Hollan]

But all that involves a lot of work. Facebook got popular because it made it easy.

Exactly. Setting up a web site, email server, etc. is non-trivial. Though, if someone designed a turnkey system to do that, it might become popular (Think of what MythTV does for roll your own DVRs, though it is still far from turnkey).

But, there is a problem.

Because Facebook has all the data on all participants, it can reflect that to each individual one. If a "friend" posts a status update, you see it right away. You don't have to "poll" their server to get it. I suppose the server could support a "push model" to let all friends know when a status update occurs, but this runs into the problem of connectivity between servers. Further, imaging wanting to get current photos of all your "friends" and having to hit all their servers. Having all the data in one place provides a reliability that reduces the need for caching, push updates, and network bandwidth. Of course, it is also a single point of failure and control, as much as it is one of convenience.

Clearly, this can be mitigated with a careful combination of caching, push notifications, and data pulls.

But, the important thing is to settle on a data schema and interchange protocol as well as have turnkey peers to make it work.

The Internet is devolving from a distributed system of peers to a client to centralized server model because of convenience for the masses.

I run my own SMTP server for sinking email. Even for something that simple, it's a bit of a hassle, what with keeping it up 24x7, making sure it doesn't relay, etc. Granted, email retries help with downtime, but that's an accident of email originally designed to accommodate systems with transient connectivity,

The way to return to a peer to peer model of networking is to make the supplying of services by the masses easy. And that requires generally "mostly on" connectivity. We generally don't see that, or can rely on it, with PCs or Internet appliances. Many people turn them off when not in use, The place where this sort of thing does work is in automatic updates of set top boxes (and, updates of available software versions when various linux-based distros check), basically things that are online 24x7. So, for this to work, we need ubiquitous open computing platforms that are online essentially all the time. A Set top box is a perfect example.

In this regard, I think an Android-based set top box would be an ideal start. Not so much because I think Android (and, by extension, Java) is an ideal platform, but because it is gaining deployment share, starting in the cell phone market. In fact, it would make sense to the client-side of such distributed applications to be available for portable computing devices, and both client- and server-sides on tethered always on stationary devices. So, when a Facebook-like app user wanted to check his or her page from a mobile device, he or she would connect to their own home server.

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

[rwa2]

Not just easy, but Facebook got popular due to brand recognition and I guess maybe media exposure?

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/ explains it better than I can.

Same thing with Twitter, which is really just RSS with a cell phone interface and brand name recognition. Even with nearly everything supporting RSS, it never really caught on as fast and by surprise as twitter.

I think the real money to be made is for truly closed alternatives to Facebook and Twitter for use in corporate intranets or for your secret societies.

Also, I'd really like to see Google Buzz and Google Wave catch on as much more technically advanced social networking platforms, but alas, no one I know uses them. Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) has nearly everyone signed on it, succeeding where Classmates.com failed miserably and spectacularly for a decade+. So Facebook has pretty much become the hub that links to any activity going on in other social sites (flikr, livejournal, etc. where's the Slashdot comment notification?)

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

[Khyber]

"Setting up a web site, email server, etc. is non-trivial."

Yea, if you have the money to pay for others to do it for you or you're a geek. Otherwise, most decent free sites with a semi-decent WYSIWYG editor have become few and far between, and unless you can set up your own apache server, expose it to the net, run your own DynDNS, set up MySQL or other similar thing, you're pretty much SOL.

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

[Rene S. Hollan]

A free site with a WYSIWYG editor does not qualify, as few would let you configure the necessary back end data base, and peer to peer communication protocols, but more importantly, it would violate the principle of hosting your own server to retain control.

I support hosted social networking peers that remain peers are better in the control aspect from one site that controls all content and knows all network relationships, but I was thinking more of a peer app that could be hosted on a server one controls one's self. Such apps could, of course, be commercial, or more likely "free", and supported by advertising when using them. (We are starting to see this in some Android-based phone apps.)

Of course, ad-supported apps do result in privacy issues, but if one provides ad-categories at time of registration, targeted advertising becomes much more interesting: you get ad notifications of stuff you actually are interested in (at your discretion). One just has to either subscribe to an app, or provide some number of ad catagories.

The interesting thing is that while ad subscriptions will come from IP addresses, necessarily binding them to a particular individual would require the cooperation of the ISP (a small privacy "speed bump", I suppose, but a speed bump none the less).

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

[jpkotta]

You can certainly put the blame partly on Google. Their completely unintuitive OpenID URL is https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id. How hard would it be to make it something like google.com/openid?

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

[raju1kabir]

How exactly are web boards more centralized and proprietary than IRC? There's plenty of servers and OSS implementations of them, like PHPBB.

Because with IRC and Usenet, it was easy to get at the data with open protocols and do with it what you would. You could use your choice of client software to interact with the service, and there was a great ecosystem of powerful and customizable software tools.

With web boards, you're stuck using the least-common-denominator web interface that the board operator chose.

People who never used Usenet when it was good, have no idea how weak the present web discussion tools are compared to a solid threaded newsreader. I could blow through more discussions in ten minutes with strn on a 28.8kbps dialup link than I can in an hour of point-and-click slogging through PHPBB and IPB fora on a 10mbps DSL line.

As for Youtube/Hulu, try watching streaming video over bittorrent. It's not even the same type of service.

Never tried Vuze?

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

[raju1kabir]

A centralized database with pointers to user profiles (e.g., to the XML files of various users posted at various points on the net.) This really needs to be *one* registry. However, it serves a very specific and narrow purpose: if you want to find the guy named Joe from Ypsilanti who you met at an event last week, it needs to point you to his representation (if it's public.)

I don't think that's necessary. There are ways of storing this information in a distributed fashion. Storing and distributing hashes of slices of the directory data can be a condition of participation in the broader network.

It should be possible to create a truly decentralized social network alternative that will allow people to choose where to locate their profile information - with their ISP, on their own server, with a web provider that offers such a service, what have you - and doesn't depend on any single institution other than the one that defines and publishes the protocols.

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

[enoz]

If you want something kept private, DEFEND IT WITH LIVE AMMUNITION.

I would like to introduce you to the Streisand effect.

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

[pushf popf]

"If something is private, keep it off the net."
Yea, right. Didn't take long for those people trying to disappear off the grid to get found.

There's a huge difference between having information that has never been digitally transcribed and having information that was once and was then "removed". You can't ever "remove" anything.

The only way to keep anything private is to not keep in on a computer, anywhere.

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

[Khyber]

We have these things called paper archives, I bet I can still find you.

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

[Kozz]

Great. And if you go to the MAKE magazine url in the GPP and paste your suggested URL, it says "Could not verify the OpenID provided: The address entered does not appear to be an OpenID".

An AC also responded to my original post with a different URL. Produces the same error. Even on Slashdot, site of techies and geeks, it's difficult to solve this problem... (this is not meant to reflect on you personally, just the situation)

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

[pushf popf]

We have these things called paper archives, I bet I can still find you.

Find me? Who cares? I'm not hiding.

I'm guessing that you're a product of the digital era. Paper is notoriously difficult to manage, easy to lose, easy to destroy and comparatively speaking, difficult to produce and search so there's less of it. Additionally, paper is expensive to retain and well run organizations have scheduled document destruction dates. Almost nothing is kept more than 7 years. Watching someone go into a dusty basement and pull out some useful shred from 30 years ago is mostly just movie fiction.

If you want to keep a secret, don't digitize it.

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

[Devout_IPUite]

Last I checked Google Wave wanted me to get an invite... So I gave up trying to use it.

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

[Khyber]

"Paper is notoriously difficult to manage, easy to lose, easy to destroy and comparatively speaking, difficult to produce and search so there's less of it."

Tell that to my fire-resistant file cabinet. nothing short of an acetyline torch will dent it. Everything is nice and tidy and it takes me less than three seconds to find anything with my categorization system. I'm a product of the DOS age - you learned quickly to keep things organized and structured or you'd lose things rapidly in the mess of directories. If companies can't do that, that's their problem, and they have monkeys for staff.

"Additionally, paper is expensive to retain and well run organizations have scheduled document destruction dates."

Paper requires as much energy to store as an unplugged hard drive full of data, and has fairly similar storage requirements. As far as destruction goes, I have longer data retention periods than most companies, because my products will actually last for ten years or more, and I offer product-life advice, so it helps to be able to verify if the caller/questioner is a client, and if they are not, try to interest them in my product.

"Almost nothing is kept more than 7 years."

Because most products aren't designed to last that long, sadly, ignoring the matters of law.

"Watching someone go into a dusty basement and pull out some useful shred from 30 years ago is mostly just movie fiction."

Or slashdot geek reality. I still have documents from the '70s that I like to reference every now and then. hell I have hardware older than that which gets dragged out now and then and turned on to see if it still works.

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

[hkmwbz]

twitter over IRC

Huh? Twitter is nothing like IRC. IRC is real-time chat. Twitter is microblogging (not real-time).

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

[dgatwood]

Actually, it does. If you can't feasibly control who has access to information, then any open, distributed alternative to Facebook is going to have exactly zero success at preventing the same sort of data mining that they're complaining about Facebook allowing... unless, of course, you deliberately obfuscate the data so that it is hard to mine in any reasonable programmatic fashion, but doing so would also make it much less useful for your actual friends.

Don't get me wrong, Facebook shouldn't be playing fast and loose with privacy, and it's important to chew them out on principal every time they screw up, particularly as it applies to someone's public profile. However, I'm not convinced that any similar service that anybody else comes up with won't have at least as many similar problems. Coming up with good access policies is hard. Designing user-interfaces that expose those settings in a way your grandparents can understand is even harder.

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

[permanentE]

OpenID is normally pretty simple but it seems MAKE's implementation is totally borked. A lot of sites make it really easy by giving you a list of OpenID URLs to pick from, for example StackOverflow does this, http://stackoverflow.com/users/login. Since your Google profile IS an OpenID you can just put your profile URL into the login box, http://www.google.com/profiles/yourusername. If you don't trust the website with your profile URL Google also provides a redirector that works as an OpenID at https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id.

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

[thijsh]

Hear, hear.

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

[pushf popf]

Or slashdot geek reality. I still have documents from the '70s that I like to reference every now and then. hell I have hardware older than that which gets dragged out now and then and turned on to see if it still works.

Nobody really cares what you keep, or where you keep it because you're don't have any infomation that's of interest to anybody doing data mining.

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

[shaka]

Spot on.

I'm still grateful for Roxton's post though, if only for getting acquainted with the term "mansplain".

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

[Kozz]

Looks like someone from MAKE possibly caught wind of this thread. I emailed them to ask about the functionality and got this very swift reply:

The OpenID implementation for Google is currently broken on our site. This is a top priority for us, and we hope to have it fixed in the next day or so.

Sincerely,

Stefan Antonowicz
Director of Technology, MAKE/CRAFT

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

[bhiestand]

The answer is that Google's OpenID implementation is totally jacked up. There's really nothing wrong with OpenID itself, Google just puts more emphasis on making people click the "Sign in with Google" button and couldn't care about following the protocol.

I recommend myOpenID as an OpenID provider. They'll give you a valid URL. OpenID URLs should be in the form of username.example.com or example.com/username

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

[WNight]

It's easy to fix the (privacy related) problem with facebook. Remove Facebook the company.

You're right that the fundamental problems of information security won't change so why have a useless middleman picking and choosing who can see that info when you can have an open system where at least beneficial apps can have the access too. In the current (type of) system you're guaranteed to have corruption because the people who can pay the most for exclusive access are those with the most harmful intentions.

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

[rtfa-troll]

The way I read it is that things without ownership are being replaced by things with ownership. The reason, I think, is a tragedy of the commons situation. If nobody owns a particular part of the internet, there's seldom somebody who feels it's their duty to clean it up when needed and those that do seldom have the power. When someone like facebook "owns" "your" information they know that they can use that against you later, so they are motivated to keep it valuable for you now.

This is a real problem since the common data we used to have was much more valuable. People trying to solve this really need to think carefully about what facebook is really providing and how to provide it in a decentralised way:

• an extremely simple interface to:
• extremely effective spam protection
• and easy to build interactive groups/sites/forums/etc.
• and effective identity management
• and so on

Proposed alternatives just don't do the same. Sure; you might be able to set up a spam protected usenet group, but your technophobic great aunt has no chance. OpenID may provide identity, but it doesn't provide a decent simple clear interface to it. I have no way to navigate to and identify your OpenID etc. etc. Without this there's no easy way to get people to move over.

I like this idea

[DarkIye]

This would seem to pave the way for the erosion of anonymity on the internet, except for those who want and know how to keep it. This satisfies both those who call for accountability on the internet (most people will be accountable), and those who want to stay anonymous.

Re:I like this idea

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

Except having individuals do this stuff for themselves will result in hundreds of millions of insecure, poorly managed and eventually abandoned sites.

People probably aren't willing to pay a minimum monthly hosting fee for their own domain/site. And if they were they'd rather pay it to a company to put their crap up rather than have to do it themselves. And why pay for it when they can get it for free* at Facebook?

Can Slashdotters predict where social networking is going? And how?

A pay-to-play social networking platform? No tracking, no "surprises" after you add a piece of personal information, no selling your soul just to 'socialize' online so you don't actually have to do it in person?




*free as in "only for the cost of all my personal information, web surfing habits and privacy".

Re:I like this idea

[SanityInAnarchy]

People probably aren't willing to pay a minimum monthly hosting fee for their own domain/site. And if they were they'd rather pay it to a company to put their crap up rather than have to do it themselves. And why pay for it when they can get it for free* at Facebook?

That's all well and good, except the "Facebook" part. Email is already just such a distributed system. I run my own mailserver, but it's far from a requirement -- GMail is there for whoever wants it. But there are alternatives to GMail, and GMail has to play nice with them.

It's not the free service that's a problem, it's the walled garden.

Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[GPLHost-Thomas]

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.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[drinkypoo]

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.

It's called "having all your friends and many of your potential friends on the same network". You're not going to build and operate that yourself on the 486 in your mom's basement. Why not just not give facebook any private information, and use facebook?

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[adosch]

Agreed. I see no added value to even use a service like Facebook to keep in contact with friends and family. Most of the people I want to keep in contact with have my cell phone number, know my address (or e-mail) and know where I work. Out of those three things, if you want and have the ambition to keep in touch, now you have it.

The reason Facebook has even worked so well for that is luck, popularity, publicity, hype and curiosity. And curse Ryan Singel for even proposing there should be an 'alternative' to Facebook. Hello, McFly! You just got done bitching about Facebook, why would you want yet another down the internet block that will be solely driven to 'improve' on what you already hate about Facebook? Hypocrite.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[bmajik]

Just don't use facebook and stop crying

I don't.

Problem is, everyone else does.

Now, far be it from me to whine about how everyone else has to conform to my preferences, but there _is_ a legitimate problem here. Nothing that facebook does is especially interesting or novel. They don't even have first mover advantage. Yet they have the "normal person" social network graph locked up.

When one decomposes facebook into its constituent parts, one sees that each of them has equivalent or superior implementations elsewhere.

Isn't facebook really just an aggregation of parts, parts which having a best-of-breed alternative outside facebook? Yet this is what everyone is beholden to?

facebook reminds me a lot of classmates.com [which absorbed or was born from highschoolalumni.com].

I spent a lot of time trying to curate my highschool "social network graph" and for all my troubles, the company kept my data and then locked me out of it with a paywall. CDDB did the same thing.

So, fuck these companies who expect me to freely toil to build _their_ relevence, and then think they "own" my data and change their policies.

There is no reason _we_ should submit control of our social graphs to other entities. The shape of the problem is fully federated, with every relationship being potentially asymmetrical and many to many. And when one considers the "problems" that are solved in one spot with facebook [directory, content publishing, commenting, distribution groups, photo sharing, etc], there are superior solutions already out there.

What is needed is just a formalization of these technologies into a bag, and a variety of platforms/vendors that host an individuals online participation in this graph.

Basically, if you have a wordpress/blogspot, a flickr/picassa, an email address/home page, you should be able to "plugin" to something that gives all the functionality of facebook.

Yet you would be free to expire/migrate/manage your data as you see fit.

There is already a market place for different facebook related tools. Imagine how that will expand as facebook is teased apart into its constituent parts and competing yet interoperable implementations show up.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Geoff-with-a-G]

And that right there is why Zuckerburg will keep making millions and the answer to "Can Slashdotters predict where social networking is going?" is "no."

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Orp]

Yep. Any "open distributed alternative" will fall flat because what makes the mother of all social networking site useful, is that everybody frickin' uses it. You could delete your account in protest and start up OpenFrobnitzBook or whatever and have fun updating your status to the other pathetic losers who also deleted their facebook accounts out of protest.

Two easy facebook rules:

1. Tweak your privacy options to your liking
2. Before you post, pretend your future (or current) employer is reading

This will assist you in deciding whether it's a good idea to post those hilarious drunken half-naked pictures of you groping that dude dressed up in a Grimace costume.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[physicsphairy]

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.

Have you ever tried to get your friends (I'm assuming you have non-programmer friends) to send you stuff encrypted with your PGP key? Yeah, theoretically technology gives you the possibility of ultra-secure communications, but in practice, being able to implement the technical solution doesn't get you anywhere at all.

Likewise, there's simply no way I'm getting the several hundred people on my friends list to communicate with me by any means other than facebook. I can code up the most amazing web-interface ever and it won't matter unless it catches on with the public in general.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[dcollins]

"Agreed. I see no added value to even use a service like Facebook to keep in contact with friends and family. Most of the people I want to keep in contact with have my cell phone number, know my address (or e-mail) and know where I work. Out of those three things, if you want and have the ambition to keep in touch, now you have it."

I mean, honestly, Facebook's core mechanism does what it does extremely well. I just got an account in January, keep my info there very stripped-down, and even with the ill-willed privacy changes, I'm pretty glad I did so.

The ability to push short status updates to all my friends and get a comment thread going is really nice. Likewise, getting status updates from friends I'm not closely in touch with, and thereby seeing what they're up to in life, is very nice. One-to-one communications like phone and email don't do the same thing. Sure, I run my own web and email server, but Facebook fills a different need.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[GPLHost-Thomas]

AGAIN, you are talking about proprietary tools that you shouldn't be use. Why even mentioning wordpress, blogspot, flickr and picassa? What is it that you need in them? Isn't there enough open source solution to publish your content out there? Last time I had a look, there was multiple dozens of gallery, cms and blog software that you could use instead. Sharing photos? Well, can't you just send a link by email? Having a list of friends profiles? It's called "bookmarks" and it's one click away. Want to add them to your site, so everyone can see who's your friend? Well, add a link into your HTML page, and you are done.

Now, about other people using facebook. Well, first, it's their call to use it, you can't force them into having privacy concern. But the fact they do use Facebook doesn't mean you have to use it too. You can create an empty profile without information just to see their page. Then, you're going to say you need to be "friends" with them to see it. Doesn't mater, you've used a fake ID to login, so it wont hurt your privacy.

Being able to migrate your data from one big brother to another will NOT solve your issue. It will just make you wrongly believe that you are in the control, when in fact you wont really be able to check if the data you entered were deleted when you closed your account (if you even are able do so).

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[bmajik]

I mentioend those out of convenience. They exist and solve their respective problems acceptably. I don't have a knee jerk opposition proprietary software and non-open-enough websites.

The point is that _i_ want to aggregate and orchestrate the component silos into the facets of "my" online existence. If I find the policies of flickr good enough, then why NOT use flickr for my photo publishing needs?

The key difference is that when I tire of flickr or its policies, I can migrate my data easily to some other photo publishing silo and update some pointers in my "profile" [which I fully own and control] and be done with it.

I don't want to use Facebook to be some sort of anonymous stalker of other peoples information, yet never share or publish anything myself. THat's not a meaningful connection. Certainly anon-to-anon social connections are interesting, but only in certain circumstances. Yes for survivalists, yes for crypto researchers, yes for sabotuers.

Sharing photos of family gatherings? Not so much.

The basic issue is this: IMO, facebook is fundamentally a new type of paradigm for communication, like SMS, and like email, and like the long distance phone call and the postal letter before it.

But facebook is merely an implementation of this new paradigm. What is the general case? How should it be created and adopted?

I want to communicate with my mother in law, using a technological/communication/social paradigm similar to facebook, the website.

I don't want facebook, the entity, to own the terms under which I do so.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Daengbo]

But if the other major IM and e-mail players implemented it to keep themselves from being marginalized by Facebook, the solution has instant share (think of it as ... oh, I don't know ... a social networking standard). If browsers get involved for identity purposes, it's got critical mass.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Dirtside]

I don't.

Problem is, everyone else does.

And yet, somehow people managed to be social back in the day before we had shared communication spaces like Facebook. If you wanted to hang out with your friends, you called them to see what they were doing and made plans.

Until Facebook is the only way people are willing to communicate, you still have the choice of not using it. (And even then, you can still choose not to use it, because no matter how pervasive it becomes, there's still going to be a substantial number of people who don't use it. We think of these things as universal, but that's usually because people tend to know people like them, and so if you use Facebook, so do the people you know. There are entire disconnected graphs of non-Facebook-users out there.)

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[bmajik]

Well, my other post goes into this, but IMO, facebook is the most popular implementation of a new communication _mode_ or paradigm, like SMS, Email, cell phones, land lines, telegraphs, and snail mail before it.

The reason i say this is that the communication dynamics are different, and how people use it is different.

There are still a lot of people that don't use SMS. But nobody will deny that SMS is a pervasive communication technology, and that it has different connotations than a voice call or a hand written letter.

I think facebook "style" communications are the same: a new [or at least newly popular] paradigm of communication.

So while I currently don't "have" to use it; there is a social cost of not doing so. I simply miss out on some things that I'd otherwise like to be involved in or aware of.

To make this real and not theoretical, My wife is a facebook user; I am not. A co-worker of mine is a facebook "friend" of my wife. She approached me at work and wanted to discuss the latest thing my wife posted [which was a status update on our babies who are in the NICU right now].

Other people are hearing information about my own family before I am. And this isn't an isolated case.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[siride]

And yet all of these services and technologies you mention are separate things, not connected to each other, and some of them require technical know-how to set up. You might have to buy hosting, install software, etc. And that's just so that *you* can have your own page. What about all your friends? Facebook has already done the legwork of creating all of that for you, so you can just focus on the content and sharing. And Facebook has it in one place.

Now, I really don't like the way that Facebook is treating privacy. I'm actually damn close to getting rid of my Facebook account myself. But I can't sell the idea short just because of the privacy issues. It really is a well-thought out and very useful platform for what it seeks to do (aside from some small issues that crop up from time to time, of course). And you can't expect people to use more complicated and disconnected solutions when there is an effective solution already in place: Facebook. I personally am glad we have moved away from tons of personal websites and towards uniformity with Facebook for that kind of thing. Geocities is gone and good riddance. The future of the web is not moving back to basic technology. In much the same way, while buying a personal computer in the late 70s meant DIY and programming skills required, today, you can buy one and pretty much open it up and start using it, no programming required. Same with any technology. So in my eyes, Facebook *is* the better solution, from a technical and social standpoint. The privacy issues are orthogonal to that.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[AmberBlackCat]

2. Before you post, pretend your future (or current) employer is reading

This will assist you in deciding whether it's a good idea to post those hilarious drunken half-naked pictures of you groping that dude dressed up in a Grimace costume.

Those pictures would probably get me a higher rating where I work. But a decentralized social network has to happen because it's the only way to make a social network that isn't controlled by a company. The problem is the people who would make it are like the Slashdot and Linux crowds. They are completely against everything that makes a social network work. And the people who know what would make a social network work are not going to build a distributed computer network.

The moral of this story is, if you don't like Facebook, you're going to have to build something just like Facebook. They're not unbeatable. The more crap they put in to make money, the easier they will be to replace. As soon as they get crappy enough, people will be ready to abandon them, just like they did with MySpace. There just has to be a place for them to go. And for goodness sake, there better not be a moderation system.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Raffaello]

Let me play the role of grumpy geezer here and provide some perspective.

Every generation comes along and believes they are the first to feel what young people feel, first to socialize as their generation does, etc. etc., and every generation is wrong.

This has been increasingly true. Since the early 20th c., each succeeding generation has less and less time depth (i.e., they know less and less about how life was lived a half century ago), and less real difference with their predecessors in regard to the ease of long distance communication. As a result, each generation believes they are the first to socialize electronically. They are not.

There is very little functionally that social networking sites provide that hasn't been present since the advent of inexpensive nation-wide telephone plans about a quarter century ago (the only missing part back then was the mobile piece), and essentially nothing functionally new since the widespread use of mobile phones.

Those who claim that the means of communication (voice v. sms v. email v. blog v. etc. etc.) makes the difference are deluding themselves. It is these superficial differences that each generation clings to as its identity, so each new generation must find some "new" way to do pretty much exactly the same thing just so they can identify themselves as "young" in contradistinction to the "dinosaurs" who still communicate primarily by some "geezer" technology, be that supposedly "outdated" technology voice, or emaill.

Facebook is successful because they have sold young people the illusion that they are engaging in a fundamentally new form of socialization. They are not. They are hanging out with their friends just as people have done for 200,000 years or more, its just that the generational window dressing has changed.

As a result, TFA is yet another misguided attempt at a technological solution (open equivalent to Facebook) to a social problem (young people want a separate social identity from their parents' generation). Facebook and other social networking media provide that separate identity. Replacing it will be a matter of social engineering (i.e., convincing young people that what you're offering is their generation's social identity, and theirs alone), not primarily a matter of technology.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget that there are places caching this information. Stopping use of picasa will most likely not remove your contents from every site that had it cached there. what you put on the net is out there forever in some form or another in most cases. Nothing is stopping someone from acing that info for postarity.

I still, besides interconnectivity and ease of use, see no difference in facebook over geocities. It's just evolution.

In all honesty, the main reason why all of this privacy stuff started was marketing. Social networks are scavenged for information on a regular basis so companies can peddle their wares more competently (or so they think) meaning...

Also, in the end people must realize that there is nothing so unique about them over anyone else. It might suck to realize it, but your personal info really isn't that interesting to anyone except thouse tring to make a buck.. And to them youred just a number anyway.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[icebraining]

And yet, somehow people managed to be social back in the day before we had shared communication spaces like Facebook. If you wanted to hang out with your friends, you called them to see what they were doing and made plans.

But in that time no one had Facebook. Now many people expect you to have and if you don't, you'll obviously miss out some stuff; for example, someone posts an invitation to a party on FB, but they don't remember they need to call you.
Like when everyone used the phone, you'd miss out if they had to walk to your house or send a letter.
If you don't use the current mainstream communication systems, you'll be left out some times. If that's OK for you, fine.

I one the other hand keep a FB profile to watch what people post, even if I don't post it myself.

(And even then, you can still choose not to use it, because no matter how pervasive it becomes, there's still going to be a substantial number of people who don't use it. We think of these things as universal, but that's usually because people tend to know people like them, and so if you use Facebook, so do the people you know. There are entire disconnected graphs of non-Facebook-users out there.)

So you are prepared to choose people based on their Facebook adherence? Your friend's demographic will be mostly composed by 70 year old people or toddlers :P

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Dunkirk]

First, Wordpress is GPL software, so you can't lump it in with Flickr, et. al. (I just converted my personal site from a custom Rails app to Wordpress.)

Second, what I haven't seen anyone remark about in this thread so far is RSS feeds. If people create their own sites, put whatever content and restrictions they would like on them, and then make different feeds for different groups of people, those people can aggregate what they want with a good feed reader, and everyone's happy!

But, yeah, that's a lot more work.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[GPLHost-Thomas]

I was not especially thinking about using PGP and all this kind of heavy equipment. It would be like using a carrier to cross a small river.

But what about uploading your photos to your own website, set a .htaccess / .htpasswd, and give the login / password to your friends? It doesn't seem insanely hard that your friend cut/past the login/pass you give them. And even if you send this over an unencrypted medium, it's still safer than posting the same content on Facebook. Also, if you search a little it, I'm sure you will find a PHP app that has the feature to password protect things, maybe even with openID support so people doesn't even have to login once you authorized them.

Now, my point was NOT about the general dumb public that doesn't even have a clue about the evilness of sites like we are talking about. But you, an IT guy reading /., are you really saying that you can't do without them? You don't know how to build a website, upload $php-web-galery, or setup a mailing list? COME ON, I'm not buying it, I believe you are simply being lazy here.

Until you guys are continuing to say that functionalities are more important than privacy, you will continue to get in the same kind of trouble. It has ALWAYS been the case that to keep things private, you need to put some efforts into it (and your PGP example is a good one). Now, know it, live with it, make your own choice, and stop whining about it when $big-brother is trying to make money with the content you VOLUNTEERED to upload because you've been too lazy to use another way.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Dunkirk]

I'm with you. I took a couple of hours and literally, manually deleted 99% of the stuff I've done on Facebook, and have stopped using it. (Yes, I realize that the company has this stuff forever, but I've learned my lesson.)

The problem is that "free" will always win. Always. People, in general, are willing to trade anything for "free." The few, vocal persons who are not (willing) will always be inconsequential in these matters.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Lord Dreamshaper]

This will assist you in deciding whether it's a good idea to post those hilarious drunken half-naked pictures of you groping that dude dressed up in a Grimace costume.

And therein lies the real problem, of which Facebook is merely the grand-daddy of monetized symptoms: I should have the right to post a compromising picture or story of myself (or an innocent picture or story that is only compromising out of context) to have a private chuckle at my own expense with a few friends and family and suffer no immediate or future consequences. We've all got embarrassing pictures of ourselves and others, and they of us, but it never used to cost us a future job except in the rarest of deliberate & vindictive betrayals by a friend/family member.

Now, the internet is forever and you never know when your privacy might be breached over something you no longer remember. As long as simple cut and paste exists, this risk doesn't go away even with opensource solutions where you control your information exactly the way you want. It's too easy & common for someone to innocently put their copy of that picture on their website or e-mail or whatever, and you can never put that embarrassing genie back in the bottle, just pray that no one stumbles along the wild internet and connects the "whatever" back to you.

Maybe Facebook et al. need to be reigned in, but they are merely taking advantage of (& are a symptom of) the real problem. Society will either have to learn to go back to sharing risque items via "sneakernet" or society & the corporate world will have to learn to disregard anything found on the 'tubes as heresay and unfounded rumour, even when it consists of actual proof.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[future assassin]

Agreed, if those 100's of people listed as your friends even gave a slight fuck about you, except for having yet another friend in their profile they would have used other forms of communication to keep in contact with you. Same goes for you, I bet 95% of people in your friends list you'll never even talk to in real life and there's probably good reason why you never tried to keep in contact with them before.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[insertwackynamehere]

The problem with posts like this is "me me me"...you don't need a facebook, therefore it sucks. Why don't you just not get a facebook and stop freaking out about the people who do? We are glad that for your needs, a phone and email are all you need. Realistically, this isn't the case for many unless everyone were to immediately drop facebook at once.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[insertwackynamehere]

I completely agree. The stubborn ignorance of most Slashdotters is ridiculous.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Luke has no name]

I never opened a Facebook account, and at this point I'm damn glad I didn't.

Man, I wish I were cool like you.

But seriously, when most of the people you know use it as their exclusive form of communication (along with phones), it makes it damned handy. It's better (excluding privacy) than trying to set up your own website/email/image hosting program and try to manually find your friends' sites and RSS feeds. It really makes online communication great. If you can't appreciate the benefits it provides, I don't know what to tell you. Yes, the privacy issue is bad. I've taken everything off my profile (used to have all my groups to follow, bands I like, etc.), but now it has only a profile pic and my name. I use it for IMing most of my friends.

For the record, I'm a college graduate, not an 8th grader. Proceed to telling me to get off your lawn and that I should be using 4.3BSD for my gopher server.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[bmajik]

And yet all of these services and technologies you mention are separate things, not connected to each other, and some of them require technical know-how to set up. You might have to buy hosting, install software, etc. And that's just so that *you* can have your own page. What about all your friends? Facebook has already done the legwork of creating all of that for you, so you can just focus on the content and sharing. And Facebook has it in one place.

How many different data stores, physical servers, etc do you think are involved in rendering your face book page?

Answer: lots

The questions, then, are:
1) why should one entity control _all_ of those data stores and their composition/aggregation
2) why should the way facebook.com wants that page to look be the only way all such pages look

Nobody is actually advocating a return to blogs. What I (and others) are saying is that blogs are one silo of the facebook experience, and there is a great diveristy of blogging software and hosters, with various levels of fine grained control for commenting, syndication, and so on.

The experience that I want is something that looks and works "similarly" to facebook, but is fully federated. I think that's technically possible -- without that much software work, honestly.

Obviously the social inertia is the big problem, but before facebook, there was no facebook.

Because of standards, people can have different [and competing] providers for phone service, cell service, email service, and so on.

Bell South customers can call NYNEX customers. Hotmail customers can email GMail customers.

What I want is for facebook and myspace users to be able to "friend" and "thumbs up" each other, as well as identities/content manged/controlled/hosted on other sites.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[siride]

Yes, of course Facebook uses all those technologies under the hood. But *they* manage them, not the end user. They hide the implementation details and provide people with a useful abstraction.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[drinkypoo]

Because other people will reveal things about you?

Don't make jackass pricks who are careless of your privacy (at least, more careless than you care for) your 'friends' on Facebook, and it won't be linked to your identity there. Problem solved. I don't have any 'friends' on the list that I wouldn't call (or like to call) friends. If someone displays retarded behavior I remove them from my list. Blah blah blah I'm so cool but anyway facebook is not the devil, any tool can be misused, be careful how you use it and who you use it with. It's like sex, how many degrees of separation do you have? Except instead of working in one direction in time, it persists and feeds on itself. Don't exchange data with just anyone.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[bmajik]

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).

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[h0dg3s]

Even if you bothered setting up a website like that and sent the login info to your friends, they might go for a week or two and then they will forget about it. They'll keep going back to Facebook though. Your website won't send them an SMS when you update your status and there's no significant reason for them to keep going back. Your best bet would be creating something and getting all of your friends to use it, but even that's doubtful because everyone they know is on Facebook.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[adosch]

I didn't see anyone freaking about Facebook other than you so far. So what did you use 4 years ago when Facebook wasn't popular? Oh, that's right: phone and e-mail. So "realistically", it could be the case. I don't think anyone is making it a Facebook flamewar except you. What works for me, works for me. What works for you, is bandwagon.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[AthanasiusKircher]

Facebook is successful because they have sold young people the illusion that they are engaging in a fundamentally new form of socialization. They are not. They are hanging out with their friends just as people have done for 200,000 years or more, its just that the generational window dressing has changed.

While you started out okay, this is just nonsense. I'm no fan of Facebook or any other new "social media" devices (I'm the kind of guy who only takes his cell phone with him when there's an actual important reason to have it), but if you want to claim that there's nothing different about new social media, you're also living with your own illusions.

Those who claim that the means of communication (voice v. sms v. email v. blog v. etc. etc.) makes the difference are deluding themselves.

While to some extent, I understand where you're coming from here, this is simply wrong. Cheap nationwide telephone plans in your example didn't give people the ability to broadcast their ideas -- whether short (Twitter, etc.) or long (blog) to potentially millions of people. Studies have been posted here about how teenagers send each other thousands of texts each month on average -- many send at least 100 per day, and some of them send as many as 500 per day. Thousands of such interactions does not actually do the same thing as a couple intimate conversations from a social standpoint. And some interact on Facebook that much as well.

I very, very rarely post anything on Facebook, but when I do, I usually have a few out of my hundreds of "friends" say something in response. This includes a lot of people I haven't seen in years, people I'd never pick up the phone to call... in essence, people I sort of know, but people I wouldn't really call my "friends" in the real world. Yet they will respond to something I say, and if I were to post updates about my life, they might read them, etc. Keeping up hundreds of "friendships" in the real world is next to impossible, but now you can keep hundreds of connections active -- or at least broadcast your thoughts to hundreds of them. Generally, someone's out there listening.

And I'm someone who's notorious as never being on Facebook. For my close friends who are, these sorts of interactions are happening all the time.

If you don't see the difference between hanging out with maybe a dozen close friends in long personal conversations versus having 140-character or so interactions with hundreds or even thousands of people who tune in and out as they wish, well, I don't know what to say.

It's sort of like comparing a search engine to traditional reference materials. In Google, I can search thousands or millions of resources instantly. Or I could look up things in the dozen or so books on my shelf. If I have thousands of resources instantly at my fingertips, the way I use it will be different (I'll look for smaller, more specific bits of things) than if I only have a few books (I'd be likely to read longer passages to get greater context, be dependent on a few limited authorities on a topic, etc.). Social interaction on Facebook does a similar thing -- and it is different from "hanging out with your friends."

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Dirtside]

Facebook has 400 million active users (their own claim). That leaves 6.4 billion people who are not on Facebook, and I imagine most of them aren't toddlers or 70. :)

(Yes, I realize there are other social networks out there, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of humans are not using social networking websites.)

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[icebraining]

There's also plenty of people in the world without cellphones, but in my country there's more than one per person in average, and I'm not ready to migrate so that I can not use a cellphone.
Likewise, not only internet access is much more pervasive in my country than in the world, as a geek I tend to have technical inclined friends, who probably have FB accounts.
Besides, FB hasn't reached it's peak and if it does die, it'll be replaced by something similar.

Sure, I know now many people who don't have FB profiles, but especially in my age group, they are less every week. *Everyone* in my course has an FB profile, for example. Of those, mine is probably the less filled with data.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[AchilleTalon]

To me, the real problem is all the data is lying on servers located in USA. Since I am not a USA citizen, I am anyway submitted to USA laws since the server is in USA. I do not have a right to vote for the USA government, but the USA government is giving itself the right to dig into my data records FB and others are having not choice to give them on a simple request.

Why a citizen of country A should be submitted to laws of country C because he is having friends in country B and the virtually talk together using a server somewhere in country C, because these service companies are no implementing servers elsewhere, or the make sure if they did they replicate back data in USA.

The social network is not country bounded and no country should own the right to dig into all these records. Even the company shouldn't have right to sell them without approval of the real owner.

To summarize, the ideal social network should be composed of a myriad of servers owned by the users in their respective homes. No one will have an automatic right to look at it unless invoking the laws of the country where this personal server is located. The social network, will then be composed of a directory of users, that's it, that's all. Requests to become a friend or subscribe will be sent to the personal server and the individual will be the sole to decide and manage access rights to his content which he will also be the sole owner. Individuals will communicate directly with each others, not via a centralized server and data should be secured.

That's how the future social network should be designed.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[Ren.Tamek]

Basically, if you have a wordpress/blogspot, a flickr/picassa, an email address/home page, you should be able to "plugin" to something that gives all the functionality of facebook. Yet you would be free to expire/migrate/manage your data as you see fit.

How does the first sentence guarantee the second? The first thing an internet marketing company would do with such a system is spider all available information to their own private databases. All information that you've published there, even if you later deleted it, would be available for purchase. These people, who try to fill my personal inbox with 500 pieces of marketing spam per month, will not respect the privacy settings of your robots.txt file.

And besides that, how would you prevent people on your private friends-only area from accidentally republishing private bits of your web space to their own public space by 'liking' or writing comments on your updates or photos? There would have to be a mechanism to stop that, which everyone on your friends list has to adhere to. That would be even more difficult outside of a centrally controlled company like facebook.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[soppsa]

Why even mentioning wordpress, blogspot, flickr and picassa?

Why even mentioning proper english? But seriously, not everybody wants an open source solution to publish their content. Do you think my mother is going to setup a gallery code, upload to it, and maintain it to share photos? No, she is going to use flickr because its *easy*.

Re:Just don't use facebook and stop crying

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Why even mentioning proper english?

Can you talk French, Chinese, and (a bit of) Spanish? If you can't, then you'll be more polite and excuse some of my mistakes. Anyway, even if you did understand these languages, you should stay polite and refrain from such (totally useless) comments that only deserve more than the disrespect you are throwing at me.

Do you think my mother is going to setup a gallery code [...]?

As if using or setting-up a gallery was sooooo hard. If you didn't know, there's 100s of hosts that are offering a point and click systems to install things like that. No need to upload anything: select the app, the folder, click next, and it's ready. Even a child could do it.

Truth is, your mother will use flickr because she doesn't know anything else (because you didn't tell her because you only know your geek way to setup a gallery PHP app). But let's forget about easiness.

Sure, setting-up her own domain and have it hosted is a bit more work than using $big_brother_public_server. But first, I never wrote it would be as easy, and mostly the job of a web hosting company to help people doing so. Or if you cared about your mother's privacy, you would have explain her why she shouldn't use flickr, and give a hand... Isn't it the role of people doing IT to explain what's beyond the scene, and do a bit of education for those who wont know?

Now, go ahead, and pretend that you want everything: free of charge, easy to use, and with privacy. If you are going this way, I give up adding arguments. OF COURSE, you have to invest (at least) a bit of time, and maybe few bucks a year for the hosting, if you want privacy. But also, having your own website is much much nicer result too than just a silly $public_server page that everyone else has.

Relax

[wombatmobile]

Facebook is not compulsory.

Re:Relax

[WrongSizeGlass]

Facebook is not compulsory.

I'm afraid you'll need to post that on Facebook so the right people will see it. Posting it here on /. is like shouting "pray" in a house of worship.

Re:Relax

[wrook]

I used to feel that way back when I was a programmer working the normal 100 hour weeks. Then I quit my job and did something else. But without the constant security blanket that was work I noticed I was missing something. I later learned it was called a social life. I talked to somebody and found out that groups of people were going to parties and meeting people, possibly even hooking up for sex (and not just looking at pictures on the internet, it seems). Anyway, I asked why I never got invited to anything like that. Well apart from my slovenly appearance of unkept hair, rolls of fat and poor fashion sense (hint: wearing the same T-shirt every day is no good even if it is a Star Wars one), I needed to be on Facebook. Despite having a perfectly good email account, it turns out that you wont get invited to parties unless they can simply include you on the event list. But even more than that, people check out your activities to make sure you are cool enough to be invited to the parties. Basically you have to pretend that you are doing something amazingly interesting and take pictures of it. It helps to have other people in the pictures too so that everyone thinks you have friends (but it's pretty easy to fake it with pictures of strangers, so don't worry about it). Oh, and don't forget to frequently update your status saying, "I'm having the best day ever!" so that people think you're always doing something interesting. Finally, even with all your friends and amazing activities, you have to appear uber-organized by having enough time to play stupid farm games and flooding everyone's screens with updates about your progress. After you do all this, you will get invited to parties and get laid (well... maybe -- it turns out that shirt thing is really serious).

Re:Relax

[Arancaytar]

I love that the parent is modded Informative rather than Funny. :D

Re:Relax

[that IT girl]

Oh, this rings so true. It sucks, though, having to choose between not having a social life, or having one comprised of people who really think in these terms.

Re:Relax

[DerekLyons]

Sounds like you need a better grade of friend more than you need a social network.
 
Friends aren't about sex, or cool parties. Friends are those people who, when your father-in-law dies unexpectedly, walk out on the preps for their own Christmas party to come help you. Friends are those who read the note on the door the first couple left and call you to see if you need help. Friends are those who'll drive and hour and a half to the airport at three o'clock in the morning to pick up your wife (who was out of town on business when her father died). I'd have needed a bus just to haul those who volunteered to go pick her up!
 
Seriously, if you're working so hard to appear 'cool' so you can be invited to parties so you have a higher chance of 'hooking up [for sex]', just hire a prostitute already. Spend the time saved getting out and having a life and finding friends who'll actually be there when it really matters.

Re:Relax

[Vintermann]

Wow. It is funny, but it also explains some behavior from certain of my friends that have so far confused me, namely "Why on earth do you try to give the impression that you are a perpetually drunk skiing instructor, when I know you're in fact down to earth and quietly likeable?"

Re:Relax

[Maglos]

This is probably true for %98 percent of communities, but surely tech towns you can be involved with some good social activities without all the BS? Is it just a matter of moving to were the smart people are? I'm new too a city of 100k and I find it really hard to crack any sort of interesting social networks. I don't have patience for socialising with average people, nor facebook, so that's certainly a hindrance.

Re:Relax

[turbotroll]

>Facebook is not compulsory.

No, but when 10 assholes who happen to have my email in their address book sign up and all expose THEIR address book to facebook, suddenly Facebook has created a little network with ME in it even if I've never been on Facebook. Then one of them "invites me to join" Facebook and I get an email that includes 10 or 20 "other people I may know".

In short - Facebook is cyberstalking me.

Very true -- this is the essence of my complaints against Facebook as well. Mod this guy up.

Re:Relax

[masterwit]

What do some comedians call that? Oh yea:

"Truth Comedy"

Re:Relax

[Kpau]

You've just articulated a deeply seated annoyance I have at the casual use of the word "friend" for Facebook... or many other interactions. *friends* are someone who'd do what you describe... who might even throw themselves on a hand grenade to protect you and his other friends. The dilution of that word, particularly in regard to Facebook, is a smearing of vocabulary.

Re:Relax

[that IT girl]

I have the same problem. If I lived in a "tech town" that may be more possible. (I work for a tech company, but it's not really an area built around that demographic.) I've joined Mensa and go to the meetings/gatherings sometimes, but I find it's mostly people much older than I am. While I do get along with and enjoy the company of people 10-20 years older, this group is largely beyond even that. Plus, I don't get to go as regularly as I'd like, so they kind of have their own "clique" and it's a bit hard to break into.
Oh well. I've always got the friends who live in my computer--LOL.

Re:Relax

[Maglos]

I was thinking trying to get into mensa, they require a top %2 iq to get in right? That might be pushing it for me.

Re:Relax

[DerekLyons]

I think you'd find you and I agree on that. It's not just Facebook, it's LiveJournal too..., and half a zillion other places on the 'net.
 
But even so, the OP's problem isn't Facebook's dilution of the term 'Friend' it's the shallowness of his acquaintances.

Re:Relax

[soppsa]

LOL so glad your slashdot username has the word girl in it, LOL, you should have no problem meeting lots of guys who live in your computer, LOL

Re:Relax

[that IT girl]

AC reply is right, kinda. I took the practice test and it said I was a shoo-in. The actual test was pretty much nothing like it, though. It was challenging, but I found it fun. I don't know how I did, just that I passed it (they don't give you a percentage-based grade or anything). It's definitely worth a shot; go for it!

Re:Relax

[that IT girl]

Haha. If I were creating a username today, I may not include that particular bit of information--I like when people get to know me without a bias :) It's what they called me around the campus I was working on at the time, though--"hey it's that IT girl"--since I was the only female in the department.

Re:Relax

[2obvious4u]

just hire a prostitute already.

So you live outside Vegas? How come more people aren't lobbying to legalize prostitution nation wide? It seems like it would solve a lot of the worlds problems.

Re:Relax

[arisvega]

It might be that not _all_ people you will supposingly meet on such a party will think on these terms.

A fair bunch of them could be under the same predicament as you, not really appreciate most of facebook's policies, possibly be of the opposite sex, and may very much so enjoy using sex toys.

Re:Relax

[Shihar]

Friends aren't about sex, or cool parties.

1) Speak for yourself.
2) Get better friends.

Re:Relax

[alexo]

Mensa Sweden has a nice test [mensa.se] that you can try online. As far as I know, this is the only free IQ test on the web that is properly normalized.

Stacked against people that don't read Swedish.

Re:Relax

[jollyreaper]

Friends aren't about sex, or cool parties. Friends are those people who, when your father-in-law dies unexpectedly, walk out on the preps for their own Christmas party to come help you. Friends are those who read the note on the door the first couple left and call you to see if you need help. Friends are those who'll drive and hour and a half to the airport at three o'clock in the morning to pick up your wife (who was out of town on business when her father died). I'd have needed a bus just to haul those who volunteered to go pick her up!

Finding those people is the hard part. Friends have to be cultivated. Your parent post was cultivating the wrong kind of friends, the superficial, but the same care needs to be applied to the good ones. But it shouldn't feel like a chore. Friendship is about reciprocity and you should be getting as much out of it as you're putting into it, otherwise it's called codependency. But it sounds like you've got some great friends. Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right.

Re:Relax

[DerekLyons]

Finding those people is the hard part. Friends have to be cultivated. Your parent post was cultivating the wrong kind of friends, the superficial, but the same care needs to be applied to the good ones. But it shouldn't feel like a chore. Friendship is about reciprocity and you should be getting as much out of it as you're putting into it, otherwise it's called codependency. But it sounds like you've got some great friends. Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right.

Oh, no doubt it takes time. Though in my case, living in the same town for over twenty years no doubt helps greatly. I think people move around way too much nowadays to have real friends and deep attachments. (And I suspect that may play into our high divorce rates. When you live in four different states between kindergarten and high school graduation, that may (IMO) lead you to believe in people being 'disposable'.)
 
But there are two key things in my book. First, getting out and having a life and interaction with people (other than drinking oneself into a stupor with them). Second, if you want a friend - be a friend.

Diaspora

[flimm]

Diaspora is a project that aims to be that open and distributed alternative. The four students and graduates that started it have already managed to raise $16k to work on it this summer.

Privacy

[jameson]

Well, there is some work going on towards a distributed social networking protocol.

Personally what I'd want would be something that involves all personal data being encrypted on the server side according to a private key that only the user has, with shared sub-information being encryped with shared sub-keys. Thus, even if the distributed social networking server is compromised, private data will remain (largely) private. Some more thought needs to be put into ensuring that it's not easy to infer the presence of shared keys, or otherwise even the encrypted data would allow an attacker to infer part of the structure of the acquaintance graph (which can then be used to infer other information).

Re:Privacy

[Mr.TT]

There is a new free service called ThreadThat.com that supports this model.

Re:Privacy

[Pe_Ell]

It's easy to infer data for the most part. The biggest challenge I see to your requirement for keys is the lack of interesting searches. If you encrypt everything and require keys then people won't be able to search to see if they have the same hobbies as you. What you suggest isn't much of a social site but more of a private BBS almost. Only a few can dial-in and the rest of the world knows nothing of the content.

I've been contemplating this myself...

[$1uck]

Not that I'd ever be motivated to do it.. (well maybe unemployment would motivate me). The tools seem to be there RSS/XMPP/Open id etc. Someone just needs to create an implementation of the client/server (node?) that ties it altogether. Opera's Unite looks like a promising start.

Re:I've been contemplating this myself...

[AmigaHeretic]

Opera Unite that is what I was thinking. But then people complain about how it's SO unsafe to share information from your own computer and they would never open up access like that. So which do they want? Share data from their PC and be paranoid people are going to hack their system or share their data through the evil 'facebooks' and 'googles' out there?

Re:I've been contemplating this myself...

[icebraining]

Unite only works when your PC is on. Imagine only being able to access their Facebook profile/pictures when they're online. Assured failure.

Re:Diaspora

[Anonymous Coward]

With a name like that, it's doomed to fail.

I keep deactivating my accounts....

[Bob_Who]

I can last about a week before I get really annoyed and shut it down. I've even tried multiple personalities. It all really ticks me off...I hate constantly having to confront their obfuscation and find no end to their "Bait and Click" corporate scum baggery. Its totally Zucks, if you know what I mean. I have not been back for three months now, since before they enacted recent changes that essentially put it all social data on the bathroom wall for all of eternity. Death won't be any excuse for them to stop marketing your data, since they never really cared if you live or die or even have a life. They sell your profile, whether or not you actually exist is irrelevant. Take it from all four of me.

Trust the diffusely-owned data?

[MessyBlob]

Here's a question: Can any diffusely-owned project or data be trusted? Does it require that all members of the project or support infrastructure are also trusted, or must there be a certificate-based identity/trust system to unlock the data on various levels?

Re:Trust the diffusely-owned data?

[Anonymous Coward]

I go with the level of trust with keys / certs. But like a PGP email network you lose or screw your key you're screwed because facebook won't be there to clean up your drool.

Key exchange is the bitch. How do you send a key to someone and yet remain mostly anonymous. I was to some extent able to do that with PGP key servers but what luddite butt munch on facebook even comprehends that?

Ah. I share everything anonymously. And I vanish if need to. If I want to find my classmates I just need to look through the crosshairs.

GNU Social + FOAF

[Anonymous Coward]

There is work being done on GNU Social ( http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social ) which aims to be totally decentralized distributed social networking platform.

It is going to leverage already 10 years existing FOAF project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software)

Currently it is mostly in phase of figuring out the protocols, which is correctly way more important, than having x lines of code, since when we find ourselves in a position where there is ton of different decentralized distributed social network platforms (ok) with each their own protocols (BAD), we may find it even less favorable than today...

Re:GNU Social + FOAF

[Daengbo]

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.

Hmm Let's see here

[ComputerGeek01]

Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page

What a great idea! We could post what we're doing, where we are and what our plans for the next day could be! This sounds like it needs a snazy new name. Let's think hard about this hmmm... I know we should take the words LOG and WEB and combine them into BLOG! Yet another great and origional idea from Wired Magazine. Honestly how do you still trick people into subscribing to you?

What is the solution? The cost of Free?

[MessyBlob]

I'm not sure what the author wants to make, in real terms. Is it the user base, the third-party integration, the hardware infrastructure? Yes, all of the above, as they're all necessary, but that requires a new build, with different policies. However the viability reduces to the reality of money: money to build it, and money to sustain it. Facebook is now starting to explain the cost of Free.

already happening

[miruku]

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.

Back to basics

[Yvan256]

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.

You mean like a personal website? And forget the Posterous.

The cycle is complete

[Yvan256]

Personal websites are dead, long live Geocities!
...

Geocities is dead, long live MySpace!
...

MySpace is dead, long live Facebook!
...

Facebook is dead, long live personal websites!

Re:The cycle is complete

[Yvan256]

Shit, I just realized we're about to enter a new era of Geocities 2.0

Re:The cycle is complete

[allo]

you cloud?

Re:The cycle is complete

[nine-times]

I don't think the idea is to go back to personal websites. Instead the idea is to allow Facebook and MySpace and [insert social networking site here] to talk to each other so that you can pick which site you want to use based on it's own merits rather than being forced (I know you're not really "forced", but still...) into using a particular site because it's the one all your friends are using.

Of course one of the benefits would also be that it would allow you to set up profiles or even your own little social networking site, which would eventually include open source social networking software. But it won't be a return to normal personal websites.

Popular Facebook apps

[tepples]

It's just Facebook, it's not your fucking pacemaker. Just stop using it.

And switch from farmville to what similar game?

Re:Popular Facebook apps

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

Re:Popular Facebook apps

[2obvious4u]

Because my wife spends so much time playing farmville, I started my own real farm. I took pictures of it and update it to my facebook account just like they do playing farmville. It just takes a lot longer to harvest corn in my farm. The compost takes a while. My peach tree has peaches forming. It has been a lot of fun. I can't wait till harvest time, so many tasty things to eat.

Irony

[lyinhart]

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.

Just nationalize it

[gig]

The problem is, they have something that's non-commercial, so to make it commercial, they keep selling their users out. It would be better to just have the government buy it and turn it into facebook.org with the privacy settings as they were in 2005.

Re:Just nationalize it

[PolygamousRanchKid]

It would be better to just have the government buy it and turn it into facebook.org with the privacy settings as they were in 2005.

Facebook would have to go bankrupt first. The government only buys bankrupt companies.

Now that's a real brilliant investment strategy.

Re:Just nationalize it

[greg1104]

Yeah, that will work great given how much governments respects privacy. Presumably we'll get a "add this person to the terrorist watchlist" button right on each US profile?

Re:Just nationalize it

[hodet]

Um no. If government bought it that would surely be its death. Technology changes too quickly and government moves too slow. Something else will come along, do it better, and everyone will abandon it. Then we will all own a multibillion dollar website which has become worthless.

Re:Just nationalize it

[Jer]

Government buy it? Why? Is there some compelling reason that Facebook needs to exist? It's not like a loss of Facebook would cause massive unemployment or be a giant hit to the economy. (Hell, losing Facebook might actually lead to productivity GAINS for the economy overall.)

Better to have the government pass a law that says "you know those licenses you click on that say 'we can change the terms any time we feel like it'? Yeah - those are invalid. Stop doing it or you open yourself up to a lawsuit. You need to give your customers 90 days notice of changes to your privacy terms and conditions, you need to actually send them via a paper trail (to make the company actually have to expend some money to change their minds about something), and you need to provide a bullet-pointed summary of everything you intend to sell, everything you intend to make public and everything you intend to keep private every time you do this in addition to the legalese that you provide. When you do that, you need to provide a simple way for customers to decide to leave your system and you need to delete all of their personal data on your servers immediately at their request. And if you fail to do these things, the FTC has authority to prosecute you for criminal fraud - in addition to the civil lawsuits your customers will be able to file against you."

There are many other ways to go about it, but the key ingredients are that customers should always be notified of what information the company is going to be selling or providing public access to, how they can terminate their accounts if they object, and give them a period of time between when the changes are announced and when they are implemented to get their account removed from the system if they choose. Those are the kinds of things that companies should be doing anyway, but without a law on the books there's no incentive for them to do so.

Re:Just nationalize it

[2obvious4u]

Wow, President Obama, I didn't know you had such a low /. id (78408).

Re:Just nationalize it

[hodet]

You may have just changed my mind. That could be the best thing that ever happened. What's a few billion.

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 ...

Open and Private

[hhawk]

I think it would be hard to do something completely open sourced that also had very strong privacy built in. Some sort of distributed Shamir Sharing coming to mind... As for Facebook people will vote with their feet or not..

It's not going to happen

[westlake]

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.
   

Lots of pieces of this exist.

[muyshiny]

Some combination of FOAF profiles, StatusNet updates, OpenID, and Drupal 7 would do. Mainly "FOAF" or "Friend of a Friend"---it lets you describe your profile. Drupal 7 is to have some integration with this, and it has modules for galleries and forums and whatnot. Then you'd have a social network you control. Except, I don't think FOAF has any real sort of privacy setting. What I think we need (please point out if someone's taken a good stab at this!) is some similar standard for describing a profile that has good use of public key encryption to allow you to effectively allow different information to different groups, so you can say these few people's friends of friends can see this information, these people over here are coworkers and they can see this but their friends can't see anything except what is already public, etc. without having to trust some central broker to provide this privacy as you do currently.

Re:Lots of pieces of this exist.

[Chris Burkhardt]

What I think we need (please point out if someone's taken a good stab at this!) is some similar standard for describing a profile that has good use of public key encryption [...]

It's called FOAF+SSL :)

Re:Facebook? Friends & family?

[Yvan256]

I don't know what you mean by "random text towards the end of this post is necessary for slashdot's edit window to work in Safari", I don't have to do anything special to post with Safari here. Are you on Windows or Mac OS X? Which version of Safari? Did you install anything for Safari or is it a plain install? Are Java and plug-ins disabled?

Helloworld was this ...

[altp]

HelloWorld from YEARS ago was a distributed social networking system. Its a shame that it never took off.

http://www.cooperatingsystems.com/index.htm

Helloworld was way ahead of its time ...

Social network scale and privacy

[greg1104]

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.

An open source alternative already exists

[DerekLyons]

Folks seem to be forgetting that a (mostly) open source alternative already exists - Live Journal.

Re:An open source alternative already exists

[ZeroExistenZ]

Livejournal? Does it still exist and is it still relevant?
It's almost 10 years ago I removed my account on there with extensive blogging because of the vampires and the goths who evolved into emo's.

Re:An open source alternative already exists

[DerekLyons]

Livejournal? Does it still exist and is it still relevant?

Yeah, it still exists. Relevance is a matter of one's own point of view.
 
To repeat something I've said before about LJ/Facebook/Twitter:

• LJ is like a weekend at a mountain cabin with friends - plenty of time to talk, work on things, and hang out, but it takes some effort to get there and plumbing is a bit dodgy. But it's worth it if you wish to spend some quality time with friends and other like minded people.
   
• Facebook is like an evening at a VERY LOUD COLLEGE PUB. Lots of bright flashing disco lights, everybody is buying everybody else shots, AND LOTS OF LOUD MUSIC. But it's a popular spot and easy to get to. Nevermind you can't actually have a conversation among the noise and distractions... After all, isn't the club scene about seen in cool places with cool people?
   
• Twitter is like Facebook, but the party is being held in an church basement. There's no booze, no music, no disco lights... All the ambiance of cold pancakes with no syrup. But the party is being hosted by the kewlest kid in town so everyone wants to be there - but the main activity at the 'party' is calling everyone else on your cell phones speed dial and holding 20 second conversations about what a wonderful time they are having. In between your own conversations, you endlessly overhear one end of the conversation of everyone standing close to you. When you get to the end of your speed dial, you start again from the top.

So yeah, among me and my friends who care more about community and communication than cool, LJ is still relevant.

Re:An open source alternative already exists

[Webz]

You are so out of touch if you think the two are even remotely similar. One focuses on blogging, the other focuses on being an actual social network. One is vastly more popular than the other. They are not interchangeable.

Re:An open source alternative already exists

[DerekLyons]

If you think the two aren't interchangeable, you're out of touch with the human race. (Hint: Blogging and commenting on blogs is social interaction.)

Re:An open source alternative already exists

[Late Adopter]

I like your analysis of Livejournal v Facebook, but you're off-base on Twitter. Twitter doesn't compete with LJ/Facebook/etc, it complements them. I can pop out my mobile when I'm at a pub and tell everyone I really like the band, and simultaneously see if there's anything else going on, with a simple and quick UI.

Then when I get home I can write a longer Livejournal post about how Such-and-such band is great, and this is why I like them, and hear's a link to their page so you can hear their style, etc.

Different tools for different purposes.

Google Wave could do this

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Wave (if its ever finished and working well) could form the backbone of this. Since anyone can run their own wave server, and wave servers can talk to each other, you pretty much have all you need for this, which is, a robust way to post and share information in real-time with specific, securely authenticated people. However, what people don't realize is that Facebook is hosting untold petabytes of peoples photos and videos, even if you have only an average number of friends posting an average number of photos and video's the amount of online storage you would (as a group) have to maintain is quite large. Presumably a company could host this for free with advertising, but then the might feel like thats not enough and want to mine your data, and your'e right back where you started from. I think someday you could rebuild something identical to facebook with wave-like technologies, and while the primary implementation would be something very corporate and facebooky, it should have the advantage of being able to host your own profile on your own server. What will actually happen though is people will stop caring about privacy. Whats the historical precedent for internet-based ventures which failed outright because they wanted people to share too much information? I think most of the erosion of online privacy is merely an erosion of the assumption that people are concerned with it. My mom originally thought facebook was too much information to give out to people, but now shes on it, sharing it all with the world. People actually don't care that much about privacy, they seem to think they do though. I hypothesize that the professed anxiety about privacy is actually about something much more subtle, because for all this talk about privacy, its not slowing anyone down. More than facebook too. My town just passed a law to put security cameras all over the place, there are cameras all over campus, all over britain, and people complain about it at first, but then seem to forget. No one really cares about privacy, afterall, isn't our most secret desire to be able to tell everyone all our secrets?

Re:Google Wave could do this

[iluvcapra]

+1 this, Google Wave would definitely be a way to build an open, distributed alternative to Facebook. I don't think such a thing would address the fundamental issues of piracy (you can't really delete a Wave, and instead of worrying about the privacy policy of facebook you worry about the privacy policy of your Wave host), but it's the solution TFA is looking for.

I would remind readers that Opera actually has something called Opera Unite, which gives you facebook-like media and blogging services, except all of your information resides on your computer and can be turned on and off at will. This utterly failed to catch on because nobody leaves their computer on reliably enough to serve as a host for such things, the setup was complicated and none of your friends did it. Any alternative to facebook would need years of aggressive marketing to get the network effects going, and nobody is going to leave facebook for the mere political reasons.

Strongly Agree

[CalcuttaWala]

We really need an open alternative to Facebook. It is useful no doubt, like Windows, but it is so locked in that I really hope for some open platform. Unfortunately, unlike other software, I cannot move away from Facebook, on my own. I need my network to move along with me.

Facebook works fine...

[Odinlake]

..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.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Yaa 101]

The problem is not you, even if you never posted on Facebook you friends can spoil your privacy a great deal here, especially if they do not see the implications of their actions.

That is the big problem with Facebook.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Runaway1956]

There's a difference between your freind telling another freind about something "private", and a corporation mining the same data, then selling it. And, in effect, that is what Facebook and their developers are doing. For profit snooping vs regular blabber mouth snooping. Pretty much the same difference between profesion software pirates who burn thousands of copies for distribution, and the private home user who downloads a pirated copy of MS Office. Even Microsoft understands the difference between those two pirates.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[bytethese]

For me, I understand everyone's bitching about privacy. I want to be able to catch up with friends, shares photos of recent events, etc. I even have different friends lists so that new friends, acquaintances, etc can't see all my information. So when someone goes to this level to restrict their data, there's a certain expectation of privacy inherent.

It's not about keeping secrets, it's people taking information out of context and potentially using it against you. The person that has 90% of their photos with a drink in there hand, might be perceived as a heavy drinker, when in fact it may just be at social events the person has a drink in their hand. That's just one example but people seem to take what they read and see as an exact representation of what actually is, when sometimes it is not.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[novium]

Facebook got people to trust it with their real identities with some fairly robust privacy controls, so stripping those out now is a legitimate cause for concern. Additionally, there is a difference, a very important difference, between having something be out there, and having something *broadcast*. Privacy should not and does not require secrecy. I may tell a friend (in RL or on Facebook) that I'm going down to the beach today. I may not mind if other people overhear, or if my friend tells someone, but it'd be pretty ridiculous to suggest that by doing that, I should expect both that it be passed on ("novium told so and so she was going to the beach.") to ever damn single person I know, in addition to the government, corporations, and every random joe out there. The thing about telling a friend something, online or in real life, is that people have an innate sense of the context that all social interactions carry. They'll know who it is appropriate to tell and who it is not. They'll understand the connotations of telling person A version telling person B. And I'll know them well enough to assume how they'll handle that information... and if they violate that trust, it will have been a decision on their part, and will in a sense part of larger set of social interactions, the result of which might be that I'll either chew them out or stop talking to them. Yes, of course, you shouldn't put anything on the web that you might not want found out. It's a record, same as anything else. But then, once again, we're hitting on the issue of privacy rather than secrecy.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Phurge]

choose your "friends" wisely?

not that I have any at moment, being on /. and all, but in the future I hope that I can share that I'm posting this from mom's basement... oops, did I say that?

/. should really have basement privacy filter on it....

Re:Facebook works fine...

[LaRainette]

The issue is while connected to facebook if you do whatever you like doing it will be registered somewhere. Example ? I connect to facebook on day 1 hour 1, I chit-chat than check my mails and close my facebook page, then I go to newegg.com or galerieslafayette.fr or any website that sells something. Day 1 hours 3 : I reconnect to facebook and what can I find as an ad on my facebook page ? the EXACT PRODUCTS I WAS CHECKING ! And they follow me every hour of every day. Every time I connect to facebook or Gmail I get advertising for products I have been checking somewhere on the web. Thing is : I am NOT registered on any of those site ! so how do they keep track of me ? it's not cookies and it's not IP...

Re:Facebook works fine...

[zoloto]

User error then.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[AthanasiusKircher]

I am NOT registered on any of those site ! so how do they keep track of me ? it's not cookies and it's not IP...

Assuming they are actually tracking you, are you sure it isn't cookies of some sort? Unless you're doing something like running Firefox with NoScript (to stop random scripts running and doing random things), RequestPolicy (to control the requests sent between websites and the interactions between them), some cookie manager that goes beyond basic browser settings to really limit cookie use (like CookieSafe), BetterPrivacy (to disable Flash cookies), etc., etc., etc. you kind of have to assume you're being tracked by something.

Or you can have a virtual machine with only an OS and a browser installed, which you boot up only to browse the web. Each time you browse, you start the machine from the same original state and never save it... that way, you can be relatively sure random data isn't being stored on your machine to track you in any way. Of course, this also depends on disguising your IP as well.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Yaa 101]

I have no Facebook things and stuff... ;) And my friends are fine.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Zarel]

... 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...

Actually, that's not true. I can make lists of friends, and have a list of friends whom I trust not to share my information, make nearly anything - posts, photos, profile information - visible only to people in that list.

Here's a screenshot of Facebook's privacy page, allowing me to control who sees anything in there: http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/5305/screenshot20100509at229.png

You can get that same menu to appear for each individual thing you post - so one of your photos or status messages can be visible to everyone ("Hey, guys, come buy my stuff!") while another is only visible to a friend ("Oh, fuck, I just realized my stuff is infected with a horrible disease!")

All the people complaining about privacy seem to be complaining solely about default settings, and they should just realize that when most people sign up for a site like Facebook, they want other people to see what they write. If they aren't the settings you want, just click on the settings menu and change them!

Take, for instance, TFA.

"Facebook sets the default for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct funnels to the net’s top search engines. You can use a dropdown field to restrict your publishing, but it’s seemingly too hard for Facebook to actually remember that’s what you do."

If I send one message only visible to a group, I don't want all my future messages to all be only visible to that group, unless I remember to change it back. If he wants to change the default, there's an option here: http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/6425/screenshot20100509at245.png

"This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile. They all must be public"

Actually, there are privacy settings here: http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/6425/screenshot20100509at245.png

"Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page."

This is a ridiculous claim. I just made a status message saying 'Warzone 2100 is an awesome game' and it didn't appear on the Warzone 2100 page. I think he's referring to the "@" feature, where if I had typed "@Warzone 2100" it would've asked me if I wanted to tag the page (and if I ignored the prompt and kept typing, it would not have done so), but to call a secret code that you have to explicitly agree to 'all the right words' is ridiculously misleading.

Then there’s the new Facebook “Like” button littering the internet. It’s a great idea, in theory — but it’s completely tied to your Facebook account, and you have no control over how it is used. (No, you can’t like something and not have it be totally public.)

Yes, you can: http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/7281/screenshot20100509at254.png

I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

Here's how: http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/2963/screenshot20100509at257.png

I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Hurricane78]

WTF? Yes you are right. You don’t remotely understand anything.

Do you even know the concept of trust? Some you trust more, some you trust less. And trust is a gradient! That is the point trust is relative and trust is a gradient!

But 1. Facebook only has an either/or black/white switch, with only two groups (friends and non-friends) and only two settings (can always see, and can never see). And 2. worst of all: It’s all on their servers, under their control. And their choice is that the advertisers and everybody who pays, always get to see everything. Since according to Zuckerberg “there is no such thing as privacy” (you don’t want to be friends with such a type of person), and any privacy setting to him is merely a nuisance of some “retarded delusional people”.

No. Fuckin. Thanks.

What we need, and what I was the first to say, is a p2p network of trust. With easy to set up server nodes (so that you don’t have to leave your computer online for others to load your profile & co), a standardized open protocol with encryption, rights management and authentication that maps the social structures that people have anyway, and at least one client for it.
Oh, and a Facebook importer and auto-inviter for all your friends.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[swimin]

Though I doubt this is the case, check out: http://panopticlick.eff.org/

Re:Facebook works fine...

[access.name]

It's not about the things we put on facebook anymore, and it's not about the things our friends put there anymore either. Now facebook collects data about any site I may visit, see this article describing the problem, a "bug" facebook "fixed" already, (my guess is they just hid it from the users). This happened to me the other day.

I don't like a centralized place where my browsing info is stored, and where all my family and contacts can be related to that info. I'm not interested in anyone knowing that me, with parents named such and such, that attended school such and such, etc, just browsed a hentai porn site.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[atrizzah]

The issue is not that people are putting super-personal information on Facebook. Most intelligent people who actually care about their privacy know better than that. The problem is that there is a difference between sharing information with the people you know (even if they number in the hundreds) and publishing it to the world for any person or organization to see. I really don't care that much if the whole world knows my favorite movies and interests, but I see no reason to expose that information about me to people I don't know.

What is so aggravating is that Facebook started out as a site for the entertainment of its users, but that has taken a backseat to their ambition to become the new nexus of information on the Internet. Most of their changes could be really nice. By my count, there are three new "features" from the past couple weeks:

• Opt-out Instant Personalization, which shares information between Facebook and several websites, giving them a more social dimension
• Opt-out sharing of basically all of your profile with applications YOUR FRIENDS install on their accounts
• Profile Connections, which networks and makes public most sections of your profile, and has completely replaced those profile sections

But instead of letting users make the decision whether to participate in these new initiatives, they have made them all the new default, or in the case of Profile Connections, it's there way or the highway. Of course Facebook has the right to run their website how they feel, but we as users don't have to put up with it.

In response to Facebook's cavalier attitude, I have deactivated my profile. However, I'm considering reactivating for one particular reason. Facebook is a fact of life now for most people, and it won't miss me much if I never come back. But I do want Facebook to change, and I'd like to continue to stay connected through it. Ironically, I have figured out that the best way for me to mobilize the people I know to demand change from Facebook is by reaching them through Facebook. I think I will try to organize a one day deactivation campaign. My deactivation isn't even a blip on their radar, but if dozens of people deactivate for a day, maybe that will turn some heads.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[raju1kabir]

Actually, that's not true. I can make lists of friends, and have a list of friends whom I trust not to share my information, make nearly anything - posts, photos, profile information - visible only to people in that list.

I think we all know that. You're missing the point.

1) There has been a steady stream of leakage conduits wherein information escapes those rules that you think you've set. Applications are the worst problem, since your friends' apps can see almost anything they can see, and it's impossible to police what the app developers do with that data. But also there have been straight-up bugs, such as the one a week ago that was revealing all kinds of "private" information even if you thought you'd set your privacy options properly.

2) Facebook keeps changing the rules. Every few months more things go "open" by default, and you have to happen to hear about it, then go in and change your settings again.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Remusti]

Pretty much the same difference between profesion software pirates who burn thousands of copies for distribution, and the private home user who downloads a pirated copy of MS Office. Even Microsoft understands the difference between those two pirates.

Yep. But we usually don't call both groups pirates. These professional pirates you speak of are more accurately counterfeiters.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[bipbop]

Doesn't have to be friends. Just people you know. Possibly people you knew a decade or two ago, actually.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[juhaz]

But 1. Facebook only has an either/or black/white switch, with only two groups (friends and non-friends) and only two settings (can always see, and can never see).

Entirely, and totally wrong. You can control every single thing you post down to an individual person, or lists of people that you maintain.

2) is true, of course, but it's not a Facebook specific issue, it's a problem with every centralized service.

Re:Facebook works fine...

[Joe Mucchiello]

Finding the links to those fine controls is getting harder and harder with each new update.

Also see Eben Moglen's talk "Freedom in the Cloud"

[janwedekind]

ISOC-NY Event: Eben Moglen ‘Freedom in the Cloud’ – 2/5/2010. ISOC-NY afterward created a provisional page on their Wiki about a Freedom Box.

Re:Diaspora

[insertwackynamehere]

Wow...with the exception of Bing and DailyKos you just named some of the original web businesses whose names truly stuck and were actually great.

Yeah, but who will host it?

[kindbud]

And what will prevent that entity from doing the same thing?

The only thing that makes sense is not to put anything private in a public forum, and to regard Facebook as a public forum.

If people aren't doing that already, then no amount of software cleverness can help them.

Somewhat on topic

[AbRASiON]

I have my facebook settings absoloutely locked down as tight as it will allow me yet *they* continue to change what is defined as private or not.
The recent big change (2 or 3 months ago?) which got a lot of media attention, their changes 'accidentally' flagged everyones stuff as insecure again and we all had to re-secure it. (No I'm not being paranoid, it literally went from 'friends only' visibility on some items to 'everyone')

Furthermore, friends of friends can see and or add me now, infact they are prompted to add me and I'm constantly having to ignore unwanted friend requests.
What really bothers me though is this facebook connect business, I've never signed up for it or used it but I recently watched a Starcraft 2 match and it had my full name on the website, I don't know the technical term but my facebook cookie I'm guessing was imported by livestream, just like that - I literally clicked nothing to allow it to identify me.
Apparently gawker does this same thing.

This is where they are starting to really push my envelope of tolerance. I don't have much to hide particularly but these people are starting to get downright nasty and I am beggining to feel potentially violated here. I'm not normally one of those 'must be secure!!!' types but this could be abused, how long until my entire profile is public? How long before a potential employer googles up a picture of me at a party or something with a beer in my hand acting like a tool ironically and they mistake it for being genuine behaviour?

I'm not at the point of closing my account but I've got to say, for the first time it's actually crossed my mind. Why are these people deliberately destroying themselves? If you want to exploit stupid people, go ahead but for goodness sakes please let the smart user lock their stuff down.

Re:Somewhat on topic

[AbRASiON]

Ooops I missed: It was livestream.com - it instantly knew who I was when I went to the stream I was linked to.

P2P needs to take the lead

[puppybits]

Facebook's progression of privacy has been apparent with its constant policy changes. I've been working my 'solution' to this for about about 6 months called Clusters.

It used Flash/HTML5 with Adobe's stratus service as a back-end for the P2P connection. It only works with when the computer is on, obviously. To get around that limitation the user can choose to have others who are approved to view the content, to also save it locally in an encrypted database and share it when the original users is offline. The content owner can set what and how long the content is allowed to be distributed via another's machine. With each user deciding how much space to allot for saving others data.

The users can create multiple GUIDs to be used for segmenting permissions. So one person can have a family/friends network that has X permissions and a work network that has Y permissions. Each submission can be shared with one or many GUIDs. I'd also like to have plugins for Twitter and Facebook as they are good services but not "the" answer.

This effectively turns your friends into the servers for a private network. With users responsible for their own network. The connection web server only a map of GUIDs to the current stratus IDs. No personal information is saved on the server nor a way to retrieve a stratusID without knowing the GUID. Personal data is saved on one's own machine and can choose which groups can have what information. Users can opt-in for an openID login to store their GUIDs on the main web server so they can access the network from any computer or web terminal.

The display interface is all HTML5 web-standards complicate and using Flash to augment HTMLs shortcoming like VoIP, webcam and P2P. Flash's power has always been to rapidly add new features to browsers without having to worry about end-users installing another plugin and thats where it should stay. Flash is the China to HTML's UN; both have benefits. Also the central web server should be minimized as much as possible. The web server should only be used for sending the stratusIDs to approved users, store GUIDs online for those who opt-in and registering new plugins/themes/skins.

If any slashdotters are interested in turning this into an open source project, have ideas or pessimistic comments; speak up.

Identity ownership

[Ironix]

My friend Blaine Cook (of Rails scaling and Twitter fame), recently wrote an article on this subject as well. He makes some interesting suggestions. http://blog.romeda.org/2010/04/identity.html

Stop ranting, start coding.

[phlawed]

OK. Facebook sucks. get over it.
I believe most building blocks for a truly distributed, open facebook alternative already exists.
It "just" needs a shitload of glue and polishing. And a fancy projectname. "buttpaper"?

OpenID for id purposes?
Torrents for distributing data?
Some kind of PKI system to regulate access to data in the "cloud". Also holding the tracker location?
(Can this be designed to not rely on central infrastructure, yet be made simple enough to work for the average Jean?)
Must allow for single users running their own site, as well as bigger sites holding larger number of users.
Some way to import relevant stuff from FB.

Build this, eliminate the security flaws, then convince a few million FB users. And be ready to fight he FUD from Zuckerberg & co.

Re:Facebook? Friends & family?

[Weezul]

I'm often unable to position the cursor using the mouse, use the contextual spell checker, or select text. I've a fairly vanilla safari configuration on Mac OS X, pop-ups are disabled, no crazy css that I remember. I now use ClickToflash but the issue predates that.

Re:Seriously?

[$lashdot]

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?"

Re:Already Exists

[siride]

It is not a replacement for what Facebook has, nor does it have the simplicity of Facebook.

How to delete your facebook account

[Bodhammer]

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=16929680703 Be warned, you need to delete all your content too. P.

Re:How to delete your facebook account

[onza1]

Just write http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account on your browser to completely eliminate it.

Opera Unite

[allo]

now somebody write an webservlet for facebooklike things for opera unite, and you have your distributed facebook. it already has the ability to share files/pictures and it has a fridge where you can leave some greetings

what do we want again?

[fikx]

reading the comments I'm confused...Do we want another alternative (another "walled garden" ) but built on open source? Or are we wanting an open version of these network sites? If someone could clear that up I'd know what rally cry to use...

personally I think an open/distributed version that works like email would be great, but that's what Jabber was to be for IM and look how well that worked...

Re:what do we want again?

[zash.se]

Jabber/XMPP works terrific, thanks for asking! And OneSocialWeb is exactly what TFA is asking for!

Re:what do we want again?

[fikx]

So, do Jabber servers all talk to each other like email servers? I thought that was the last bit of the equation that didn't take off....I know all ISPs run email servers, but few-to-none run XMPP servers...but if there are other groups that will let users talk to other groups then maybe I just need a better account.

Re:what do we want again?

[zash.se]

So, do Jabber servers all talk to each other like email servers?

They do actually.

I thought that was the last bit of the equation that didn't take off....I know all ISPs run email servers, but few-to-none run XMPP servers...

There's a bunch. And GTalk is Jabber.
And there's Facebook chat, but it doesn't talk to other servers .. yet.

And you can run your own if you want. Which I do, and I can can talk to people on MSN (and other networks if I had contacts on those).

Currently there's only a OSW-plugin for one of the server implementations, but that will probably come.

Re:what do we want again?

[fikx]

I know XMPP servers can talk to other server, but my question was more "do they?". Digging some more shows that many do as long as a server supports the matching protocol of the other server, which is better than I had thought. Does the list you linked include only servers that talk to other servers? or just a general list of servers?
Spectrum.im looks intersting, but I couldn't figure out how it works...do you have to create or have separate accounts on the other IM networks?

Re:what do we want again?

[zash.se]

It says on the "Public XMPP Services" page that it's just a list of servers that have been registered. I do think most XMPP deployments have enabled talking to other servers (aka federation).

Spectrum is an server component that acts as a gateway to other networks (MSN, ICQ, AIM etc), so contacts on those networks appears as regular jabber contacts. You do need an account on those networks thou. It's pretty much server side Pidgin, same backend at least.

Re:what do we want again?

[fikx]

So, to be blunt, XMPP/Jabber has never achieved it's goal and it's goal was the same as TFA is wanting for social networking...
The OneSocialWeb looks interesting but what chance is there of it working when we've seen the attempt at IM fail to take off due to non-technical reasons? Is there something which gives it an edge or is different from the XMPP effort?

Re:what do we want again?

[zash.se]

OneSocialWeb is a bunch of extensions to XMPP and some implementations of them that pretty much makes it into the distributed facebook TFA wants.

To say that XMPP has failed to take of would be like saying that about Linux around 1995.

Re:Diaspora

[grimdawg]

the four students and graduates with accounts at the end of its first year will be proof that it won't work.

Network =! Social Network.

[foregather]

The web is a way of linking computers together, social networks are a way for people to manage what information goes to which of the people they know in particular social contexts. The two are not the same. The web works just fine without any awareness of social contexts and social networks exist just fine without computers at all.

What we need is a way to make our digital communication tools more like our analog expectations about information management, which means designing systems that allow the controlled sharing of information about our lives with the right groups of people in private, not on personal webpages broadcasting to the world.

That could take many forms. I want a system that just handles making secure connections to my various contacts and parceling out what information gets sent to those contacts based on my history with them. Something like this: Freedom Box Schematic

Noserub

[The_Unforgiven]

I haven't seen it mentioned yet - there's yet another project out there with similar aims: http://noserub.com/

Re:A personal architecture for private communicati

[vyrus128]

You should also take a look at http://www.joindiaspora.com/ .

Us nerds have to lead

[hey]

We need to make somethings for the regular users to use. I like the idea of all content encrypted and give friends half your key. Of course, it'll need some pretty UI. A standard like that would mean it would mean the publisher and subscriber could be on different websites without any problem. Anybody could implement/host a site like that and get ad revenue.

Diaspora

[vyrus128]

Take a look at http://www.joindiaspora.com/ .

OpenID, actually not MSN Passport.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Diaspora

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Frankly I've had the same idea that they and the article are about. It seems most natural.

Especially with IPv6, if everyone had their own personal server that only they have write access to, which becomes their identity, their personal storage, their homepage (obviously), a place for them to put web apps that they want to access globally, including blogging and microblogging...

Personally, I imagine having an XMPP server (with network bridges) there in order to keep IM records globally, too, whichever IM device or service you use. Obviously a mail server, too, even if it just forwards to a gmail account or something.

Throw in a little disk encryption (which only the user has the key to) and SSL, and you have your own personal home in the clouds. Whether you use DNS to put a name to it or whether your IPv6 becomes a de facto personal ID, you've got a place that belongs to you, and contains your social networking profile plus all the rest of your data. If your provider regularly backs up your (encrypted) disk for you, you needn't worry about losing it, either. And if they host tons of those servers in a single farm, all the local interoperability is virtually instant.

The obvious question is why you can't do something like that with any web server you own... which is a fair question. One obvious answer is the lack of a readily available set of inter-operating tools (for now). Also, if you restrict the apps on that server--in particular, no multimedia--then the bandwidth usage of any particular server is very low, and it's likely most of the disk images would be small, too. So, if you were going to use this just for social networking, it would be overkill to pay normal hosting fees.

Personally, I would love to work on such a project myself if my life wasn't such a mess at the moment.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Its pure evil

[icebraining]

Actually, those images come from fsdn.com, their CDN, not facebook.com.

Re:how does an open alternative break even?

[icebraining]

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).

There is a...

[bagsta]

... spreadsheet with some facebook alternatives...

Re:A personal architecture for private communicati

[dominion]

There's also Appleseed, which I worked on for a few years, before running out of time and resources. It's about 80% done, and it already works as a distributed system. It need a lot of polish, but it's already there in terms of what's possible.

I'd love to keep working on it, I have a lot of ideas about where to go from her.

Re:A personal architecture for private communicati

[dominion]

Whoops, forgot the link:

http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/

A lot of stupity going on here

[elnyka]

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.

Re:A lot of stupity going on here

[Chicken_Kickers]

And your point being? Facebook used to be a benign and somewhat useful tool. Now it is mutating into a privacy vampire. I am a geek, though not a "computer geek". My expertise is bacteria and microorganisms, not IT or computer science. Yet, I have recently wiped a lot of stuff that on longer thinking, I shouldn't have put on Facebook, stuff like certain photos, phone numbers and real world mailing address. Heck, I now even wiped my birthday from Facebook. I did this after reading about Facebook privacy concerns on Slashdot and everyday news outlets and became concerned myself. In fact, I will probably cancel my account soon because after 4 years on Facebook, I got little benefit from it that I couldn't get from just emailing someone. Sure it was fun to find your long-lost friend from primary school, but how many of us really follow up? There is usually a good reason why we lost touch with someone, the most common is that we just grew up into a different person. Out of my several hundred Facebook "friends", I can count around only 20 that are actually real friends, not just acquaintances or the social equivalent of archaeological fossils. Coming back to your point that an open version of Facebook, made by selfless enthusiasts won't work, please go to the Diaspora website linked in this thread. A couple of university kids with nothing but big dreams and good intentions had already managed to raise $17000. This proves that there is a need for such service and people are willing to pay good money for it.

Re:A lot of stupity going on here

[visualight]

...the typical consumer of

whatever 'geeks only' technology you're talking about only needs an abstraction layer that makes it simple and some flashy artwork that makes it shiny. But the tech needs to exist first, and that tech will certainly be created by a collective of selfless enthusiasts.

Re:A lot of stupity going on here

[elnyka]

...the typical consumer of

whatever 'geeks only' technology you're talking about only needs an abstraction layer that makes it simple and some flashy artwork that makes it shiny.

That would be an excellent point except that I'm not referring at all by any stretch of the English language to 'geeks only' technology (referring instead to web-based information and publication in general as I clearly state.)

But the tech needs to exist first, and that tech will certainly be created by a collective of selfless enthusiasts.

You are asserting something as if it were a certainty. And assuming it were to happen, it is non-sequitur to my post.

Re:A lot of stupity going on here

[elnyka]

And your point being?

That it is still a useful tool to connect with family and friends, which the author of this article refers to in the past tense.

Facebook used to be a benign and somewhat useful tool.

It still is. Just because it no longer provides usefulness to different sectors of the population (of which one contains YOU), that does not indicate it is not useful at all to some other sectors (or to the majority of the population that just wants a de-facto standard of e-networking.)

Now it is mutating into a privacy vampire.

That is in the eye of the beholder wrt what you and I value/give a shit about privacy.

I am a geek, though not a "computer geek". My expertise is bacteria and microorganisms, not IT or computer science. Yet, I have recently wiped a lot of stuff that on longer thinking, I shouldn't have put on Facebook, stuff like certain photos, phone numbers and real world mailing address.

As it should be. Why would you put something like that on a site that is not your own, on infrastructure that is not your own is beyond me. You don't need to be security-savvy to know this. You only need common sense. Having (or not having) common sense is a person's onus, not the onus of an internet portal/networking service for-profit company.

That people fail to understand that (or to grasp the fact that sites like this are business trying to create a niche market based on information and personal networks), that's their (your) fault.

Heck, I now even wiped my birthday from Facebook. I did this after reading about Facebook privacy concerns on Slashdot and everyday news outlets and became concerned myself.

That's sensationalism. I have no problem putting my bod or other information that can be easily gleamed from public records on facebook. It serves several purposes for relatives, friends and past/present co-workers and college-mates with whom I network on facebook. Besides, you have fine-grained control regarding privacy levels on the information you have.

In fact, I will probably cancel my account soon because after 4 years on Facebook, I got little benefit from it that I couldn't get from just emailing someone.

Why probably? Just do so right away. Why wait if it is such a privacy pirate?

Sure it was fun to find your long-lost friend from primary school, but how many of us really follow up?

Projection. Just because you don't follow up, that doesn't mean it holds for a certain % of the population. You can't make conjectures about other people based on what works or does not work for you.

There is usually a good reason why we lost touch with someone, the most common is that we just grew up into a different person. Out of my several hundred Facebook "friends", I can count around only 20 that are actually real friends, not just acquaintances or the social equivalent of archaeological fossils.

But that is a given. What is wrong with keeping connections to people that are now acquaintances and not the close friends they were 10-15 years ago? What is the surprise in that, and what is wrong with it? Some people obtain benefit (socially and emotionally) by keeping those connections alive, even if by just checking each other's glimpses of lives via shared family photos. Others do not.

And. Both. Are. Natural.

Coming back to your point that an open version of Facebook, made by selfless enthusiasts won't work, please go to the Diaspora website linked in this thread. A couple of university kids with nothing but big dreams and good intentions had already managed to raise $17000. This proves that there is a need for such service and people are willing to pay good money for it.

Ow wow, it raised $17K. Oh Yipees!

I work in software, I've worked in securit

Re:A lot of stupity going on here

[elnyka]

Don't confuse the author of this article with a geek. Geeks don't give a shit about facebook, twitter, or blogging.

There are quite a few geeks, talented geeks (many of them spearheading some of the most important FOSS projects out there) who are active bloggers and twitteres. Several of the people I have on my facebook are hard-core software/electrical engineers. I don't know what your personal anecdotes are like, but those are mine. YMMV.

Re:Call for an alternative?

[elnyka]

It is easier to write an article (for Wired, that tells you that much) than to actually do it. The whole idea is idiotic anyways (missing the entire point of sites like facebook and people who *want* to use it.) Either he knows that and simply wrote the article to get some traffic, or he really believes it (and thus his intelligence should be called into question.)

OMG

[daveime]

When are you people going to realise ?

Facebook, of all places, panders to the lowest common denominator. It's the Fox News of social networks. Most of these people don't even know what right-click means till you show them a diagram. Why the fuck would THEY be interested in the underlying protocol (probably XML, they throw it at everything else) ?

They don't CARE, how many times can I say this, all they want is somewhere to spout their inane drivel about how they are "hanging out at the coffee shop", and how they "hate Justin Beiber" (whoever the fuck he is).

Re:Diaspora

[D Ninja]

Umm...quite the opposite. Most of those names you mention are: A. Easy to say, B. Easy to remember, and C. Easy to spell.

Diaspora is most definitely a poor name. It doesn't roll of the tongue nicely, it doesn't "sound" good. Names = Branding and Diaspora sounds like some sort of...well...let's just say it sounds like a combination of the words "die," "ass," and "spore." Not a good combo, IMO.

government regulaion

[josepha48]

is probably the only answer. force facebook to play nice with peoples information

Re:Diaspora

[h0dg3s]

Probably not, simply because "face" and "book" are both common words and "diaspora" isn't. It won't be as easy for people to remember or spell.

Network effect

[flug]

Isn't facebook really just an aggregation of parts, parts which having a best-of-breed alternative outside facebook? Yet this is what everyone is beholden to?

Hello, network effect.

There are a variety of reasons facebook has more traffic. We can discuss them ad nauseum but for now, the reason facebook has more traffic is because it has more traffic. That will continue--perhaps not indefinitely, but for a good while, regardless of technical considerations.

Someone else may have a better technical implementation or whatever, but all my friends are on facebook . . .

Re:Seriously?

[elgo]

Hmm, I want to sign up for this HIV support group on Facebook... who cares if everyone who googles my name sees it? Very disingenuous - do you work for Facebook? The point that you conveniently ignore is that Facebook's privacy settings are labrynthine and constantly changing. They continually exploit more and more of their users' data in a manner which, "new Terms of Service" notwithstanding, the users did not agree to when they signed up and are largely not aware of. While the article misses the mark with its suggestions, Facebook's interface is designed to fool users who are not tech-savvy or are just too busy to read the fine print; to dupe them into giving more information to marketers than ever before, and to share as much information about themselves as legally possible. Facebook is being duplicitous and greedy, and while it may be legal, and it may be done in degrees, their privacy policy is beyond the pale compared to previous market leaders. Of course, you could avail yourself of the benefits of Facebook by opening an account with a fake name and fake info - but that is illegal and people have actually been subject to police action for it.

my 2p worth ...

[ThirdPrize]

Facebook and myspace almost work but not quite, as to begin with they were based around the individual. thing is everything has a facebook page from bands to films, to games, to organisations. what we need is something like facebook but better modelled on the real world.

Re:Diaspora

[boxwood]

All of the examples you mentioned are three syllables or less. Most are two syllables. They are common words and easy to say. Diaspora is four syllables and not easy to say. Saying "can I get your facebook info" is easy. face and book are both words we use all the time. Saying "can I get your diaspora info" is hard to say and if someone hasn't heard of the website or is aware of the word diaspora, is going to think all sorts of weird things. Tell a hot woman you want her on your diaspora and you'll probably get a slap in the face.

Someone got a long way using drupal

[nysus]

http://statusbook.netriftsolutions.com/

Not the only one calling for this.

[schlick]

This is what Eben Moglen calls for in his lecture about freedom in the cloud http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA

That Wired guy got that idea from me

[Hurricane78]

I am already saying this, in a version that is actually thought to the end, for a very long time. I was already talking about p2p social networks, when Facebook didn’t even exist yet. I have moved on to networks of trust, and so much other stuff, that right now, I got a system that can even be used for votes, since it by its natural structure inhibits abuse of the system, even without unique identities.

Sadly, I’m so full with making my other inventions real, that I can at best add this as a side-project into them. :/
We’ll see. I am not really caring who is developing it in the end, as long as he also thinks it trough to the end (can be accelerated by asking me :), and as long as he doesn’t brag about being the great and only inventor, nearly a decade after it was actually thought up. :)

FOAF, FOAF+SSL, and OpenID

[jipn4]

There are plenty of solutions, for example FOAF, FOAF+SSL, and OpenID

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openid

*looks into crystal ball*

[Maglos]

I for-see an interface similar to Googles custom homepage, that you can plug in widgets like twitter, flicker, google chat etc. You customise the permissions for each widget using a this sites authentication layer. This site would have its own widgets as well, that could be embedded into your Wordpress page, so people could see your friends on your wordpress page as well as on your homepage. This layer will store your data or it will just hand off it off to twitter/google/facebook. And it comes with a couple default configurations for noobs. How does it make money? Just targetted ads when people are searching for new widgets. You could also sell custom installs to compete with Sharepoint for the corperate world. Anyone wanna pay me to build it? grr how the frick can I add whitespace to my posts?

What About OpenSocial?

[lloy0076]

Yes, I know it was created by Google but it does give a standard API for social networks? It seems that Facebook, which is probably the right thing from their perspective, are the biggest player not implementing it.

DSL

Re:Seriously?

[Zebra_X]

No I don't work for facebook. If I had a communicable disease facebook would be the last place I would sign up for "support". I just think most of this is ridiculous. Facebook's privacy settings really aren't "labyrinthine". They do seem to change often but quite frankly I don't care. Moreover, when people get upset, facebook does seem to respond, so that's at least a start.

"Facebook is being duplicitous and greedy" right well, Facebook is *FREE*? Are you paying for their server farm? Are you paying for their developers to improve the product? Is privacy from a free service a right? Yes. No. No. No.

Also, I have no sympathy for "tech-savvy" people. The computer is a tool just like any other tool. If you don't understand how it works, then shame on you for not taking the time to understand it. It takes time and effort to learn new things so take the time and the effort.

Privacy is a myth if you really want something to be private, don't write it down.

Finally ask yourself, would you pay money for advanced privacy settings? Money is really the only way that you can truly reconcile this privacy issue.

FOAF+SSL

[Chris Burkhardt]

But Facebook allows you to have a list of friends, which you can use to grant granular access control to information.

A decentralized, RESTful solution exists as FOAF+SSL.

What would be awesome is if popular social sites like Facebook would generate a FOAF file/Web ID for their users automatically. Then users of those sites would also be part of the open social graph (you know, the World Wide Web) and they would still look at the ads on facebook when they update their statuses or whatever you do on facebook. Win-win.

Kept planning this...

[transiit]

Kept wanting to do this, but never find time to do a working implementation, so here's an idea if someone wants to run with it.

Use Git for the backend (so everything stays nice and distributed), then write a front-end in perl (or whatever). Store all the data as XML, work out sort of a red/black separation for public and private data. Seems pretty straightforward?

-transiit

Re:And?

[quadrox]

Yeah, but what if I want to share some stuff, but only with my friends?

In theory that is exactly what facebook is about, giving you the option to socialize and share with a select group of people. But lately facebook has decided that that doesn't work out for its own purposes and decided everything should be public to everyone - which defeats the entire purpose of facebook, because now everyone can just put their stuff on their own public website and have (almost) the same thing.

Re:Diaspora

[sonamchauhan]

Hmmm .... its distributed social network software and its aGPL. That means any user who tinkers with the source is in the mandatory-software-distribution business to his social network (hopefully, this does not mean anyone who sends in a friend request.)

I'm no Facebook shill, and would like something like OpenSocial or Diaspora let us take charge of our own data, but... I'd prefer Diaspora was MIT or BSD or even GPLv2 licensed. Guys: I hope you dual-license it.

"We promise to you that Diaspora will be aGPL software which will released at the end of the summer."
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program....[provided]
* d) If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work.
http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html

Betty White got it spot on...

[agentultra]

Facebook is a huge waste of time.

She was being funny, but I think there's a grain of truth there.

What I don't get though is why people see this as a vital social tool. I've used it for more than a year and a few months ago I deleted my account. My life has remained relatively the same. The only difference is that I'm not being inundated with status updates and photos from people I don't regularly have time for anyway. All Facebook allowed me to do was extend my ability to manage a social network beyond my limited human means. However I find that this is just an illusion. Even without it, I'm still connected to the friends, communities, and interests that I care about.

Perhaps that's just me and there are people who really cannot manage their social life without some kind of software tool. That's fine of course. However I hardly see how it makes Facebook or any other such "social networking service" an integral part of the Internet experience.

What I happen to agree with is the need for open-ness. Facebook has taken to exploiting its valuable resource to an extreme and turned on its users. You are not allowed to opt-out of many of its programs now. One can only assume that future programs will only become more invasive and open to commercial exploitation by any entity that comes along. Much like the phone book. This leads me to believe that we need the ability for people to opt-out of using Facebook all-together... but there doesn't appear to be a satisfactory alternative.

So invent it. The demand is there. You'll probably get a lot of kudos.

Facebook walks a thiner line than they realize

[Shihar]

Yeah yeah, and nothing is private unless you do it in a locked room. That isn't the point. If the original version of Facebook it was pretty easy to set it up such that only friends could access anything other than your name. Further, Facebook defaulted towards privacy so that poor uneducated suckers didn't have a nasty surprise.

The reason to keep a "friends only" network is to communicate with your friends. I really don't care if my friends know that the other night I passed out in a pool of my own vomit. Hell, I don't mind if they share pictures of it. I don't care if my friends know that I hate my job or dislike my boss. This is information that is fine to share among friends either on Facebook or in the real world. Where it becomes a problem is when my boss finds out. My friends don't know my boss and have no communications with him. Could he find out something through a friend of a friend of a friend in the real world? Sure, but the risk is slim. If on the other hand I am not technologically savvy and constantly managing my privacy settings on Facebook, he could find out the same through a relatively simple search on Facebook if you failed to realize that your account is open and posted as such.

There is a lot of value in what Facebook offers. The reason why I have not nuked my account already is because it is a damn good way to keep in touch and organize with friends. What is disturbing is the slow (or not so slow) privacy removal creep. I nuked most of my profile just the other day because I frankly don't want to share with the entire intertubes what my interests are. So, is it true there is no "private"? Sure, but there is "private enough". "Private enough" is Facebook only showing what you post to people you accepted as friends. "Not private enough" is making everything you do on Facebook exposed to the entire intertubes.

Personally, I think Facebook walks a much thinner line than they realize. The techno-savvy blaze the trails in social media and the rest of the world follows. These folks understand what is going on. If Facebook manages to scare these folks away, they are going to get relegated to internet ghetto where AOL and MySpace live on as slowly rotting zombies. It only takes a few of the technologically elite to jump to a new platform before their friends start to follow. Once that happens, the outflow from Facebook will become a torrent. People don't even need to delete their profiles in disgust for Facebook to lose. Alls it takes is for people to go somewhere else when they fire up their browsers. A few hundred million users means shit if none of them uses the site and thus you get no ad revenue.

Future implications

[Pirulo]

Until not long ago, it was easy to fake somebody identity by purchasing some bogus password at an undeveloped third world country (some exceptions with first world too).
How difficult it would be to fake an identity ten years from now, when anybody drags his social network along?
One thing is faking a single identity, another one is faking a whole social network.
It's both, a solution and a problem for spookies,

Let government manage privacy... Brilliant!

[Shihar]

Srsly. Did you read that before you posted it? The idea on its face is stupid. Lets pretend for a moment that I want life long government employees running Facebook because I think that is going to result in awesome quality. The idea of the same fine folks that run the DMV running Facebook really just fills my heart with joy. But hey, lets pretend. Okay, now that the government has full access to the greatest source of information about its citizens at their finger tips under their sovereign control.... NOW your privacy concerns are quelled? Holy-fucking-shit is that utterly insane.

I don't like Facebook pissing my information around the Internet. I don't like them selling my network info to private companies. It is annoying and probably going to result in spam mail. The idea that instead of giving it to people who can spam us to death we give it to people who can throw us in jail has to be the most bat shit insane thing I have ever heard in my entire life. It is one thing for your boss to see a picture of you smoking a bong. It is another thing entirely for the police to do so. I can safely say that the surest way to murder Facebook and burn taxpayer money in the process would be to nationalize it. I struggle with if I want to stay with Facebook now. The federal government nationalizing it would make that decision pretty damn easy.

Re:Facebook? Friends & family?

[Weezul]

You can correct this by adding random garbage or text to the end of your post, somehow that lets you click above it. I've deleted that random garbage for years after I was done with it, but now I've decided that I'll start leaving it in.

You have described the Mine Project

[setantae]

The Mine project (http://themineproject.org/) exists to allow exactly this.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not what I meant.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I mean "Email is distributed the way social networking should be." Not "Email is an acceptable replacement for social networking."