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A Call For an Open, Distributed Alternative To Facebook
qwerty8ytrewq writes "Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, claims that Facebook has gone rogue: 'Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. ... And Facebook realized it owned the network. Then Facebook decided to turn "your" profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.' Singel goes on to call for an open, distributed alternative. 'Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish. Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking.' Can Slashdotters predict where social networking is going? And how?"
Relatedly, jamie points out a graphical representation of how Facebook's privacy settings have changed over the last five years.
With this so-called "World Wide Web", you can create your own web page, showing exactly the information you wish to reveal about yourself. You can show a profile picture, your name, your location, your birthday, your likes and interests, any pictures you want to share, any movies you want to share, and so forth. You can even change the appearance of it to suit your own tastes!
You can use something called a guestbook that'll allow other people to leave messages for you, and you can use other people's guestbooks to leave messages for them.
It's not related to the World Wide Web, but you can use something called "e-mail" to send a private message to a specific recipient, and they can even reply back to you!
Maybe this "World Wide Web" technology will catch on some day.
What's the issue you are complaining about here? Everyone knows that everything in facebook is public, we know it from the very beginning, and it's been years that we know how evil they are. Why don't you just post content on your personal website were you can control everything? I can't see ANY of the things you do with Facebook that you wouldn't be able to do with instant messengers and a web server.
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.
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).
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.
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?
a suite of protocols and formats have been developed over the years to achieve this. look for the Data Portability movement for one or the largest groupings of like minded folk, although the dev action is fairly distributed.
the current two interesting things to watch is the development of OAuth 2, for distributed apps, which will help with the sharing of the various open standards of profile information and the like, and the Google Buzz method of using Salmon and PubSubHubbub to aggregate comments to an article.
i'm looking forward to being able to connect WordPress, Drupal, etc, sites together to aggregate community content.
MilkMiruku
Personal websites are dead, long live Geocities!
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Geocities is dead, long live MySpace!
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MySpace is dead, long live Facebook!
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Facebook is dead, long live personal websites!
I totally agree with replacing Facebook with a new, open alternative that respects privacy. And we can start by removing the "Like" button from TFA.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
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.
We need to have a project that aims to unite all the privacy projects out there to make something good come out of it, using the power of the crowd with free software in a privacy respecting matter but in a much more powerful way that can actually serve people...
Here are some projects or ideas that deserves to be noticed:
An openID with privacy features:
http://openprivacy.org/
P2P social networks / research:
http://www.movim.eu/
http://www.peerson.net/
P2P search:
http://yacy.net/
P2P SIP:
http://www.blyon.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/22/p2p-sip-uri-dialing/
Encryption:
http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
P2P encrypted networks:
http://www.i2p2.de/
http://freenetproject.org/
Augmented reality / group mapping:
http://www.openillusionist.org.uk/documentation/doku.php?id=site:home
http://www.biomapping.net/
Mesh:
http://robin-mesh.wik.is/
I envision a setup where our cell phones or little home servers (open ones, like the n900 or better) can connect to each other via mesh, have open social infrastrcture running on them routed over an I2P layer so nobody knows who is talking to who and you have total control as to who/when/what is seen by your peers.
These setup have cameras that can use such network to create massive collaborative networks to document a situation or location. Be it a manifestation where you relay real time camera from all angles with sound level maps and other sensors to augmented reality group interaction and other crazy ideas.
This is more broad that what is discussed here as it touches all OSI layers and ask for a shift toward a p2p infrastructure at all level respecting and working for the user and independance from middle man as much as we can. ...
Of course a distributed DNS might have to be worked on too. I think these research are fundamental to the survival of freedom online as we knew it
And 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.
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).
The essence of a social networking site is that it is social - a gathering place that draws a critical mass of users.
Most like that sense of connection - and almost none of them are geeks.
"Think of being able to buy your own domain name... Broadcast{ing to) your micro-blogging service of choice."
They aren't thinking that at all.
The value of a social network is proportional to the number of members it has. Facebook started in 2004 aimed at students, grew for a while, and in 2006 opened membership to everyone. It was two years after that (and two years ago) when Facebook exceeded Myspace, and it's just been pulling ahead since. It's now blown away any previous social network scale now. If you started tomorrow with a compelling site people might use instead of Facebook--the same way that Facebook was a compelling improvement over Myspace--best case it would be two years before you'd even have a shot of being popular enough to be considered a viable alternative here. The unfortunate reality here is that making this sort of site available to most people for free costs somebody money, and that will never go on forever without somebody trying to make a buck. Social networks trying to expand are practically forced into it just to pay for their overhead as popularity increases.
As for the privacy issues, I never told Facebook anything private in the first place; anybody who did is a fool. I didn't care that they were throwing ads in my face that were obviously targeted to interests I listed in my profile to make ad dollars; expected that, all part of getting the site for free, and things like my music/movie likes are quite public information already. But last week when I visited cnn.com to read a news story, and it magically showed me what news stories my Facebook friends had been looking at (and presumably exposing what I was doing to them), that was the point where I felt myself that Facebook had gone rogue. Time to use UnFuck Facebook and crank up the rest of my hostile site defenses now. Facebook I'm now treating like a link that might lead to p0rn: I might still go there if because it's fun sometimes to look at, but I won't be adding to their ad income and I expect the site to be hostile. And I'll go out of my way to avoid all the sites they're selling my info to as well.
Folks seem to be forgetting that a (mostly) open source alternative already exists - Live Journal.
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?
..for me and I never really understood this bitching about privacy - if I post something (on facebook or pretty much anywhere on the internet) I expect that it is public. If it's posted to "friends only" it's still public. Honestly, if you have a secret and tell it to your 100-200 or so "friends", is it reasonable to expect that no one else will hear it? No, there are only two levels: "private" (don't post) and public. The misstake of facebook was to pretend otherwise, so now people seem to think they have a God-given right to intermediate privacy levels that logically can't exist since you can't really stop individuals from spreading whatever you give them.
There are at least four groups trying to do this. Can't they at least get together to agree on how the standards that get us 95% of the way there (OpenID, ActivityStrea.ms, etc.) get glued together, then go work on their code? We don't need four or five competing, incompatible standards trying to get uptake from the massive monopoly that is Facebook.
Put identity in the browser.
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.
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.
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.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
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?"
http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=16929680703 Be warned, you need to delete all your content too. P.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
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.
the four students and graduates with accounts at the end of its first year will be proof that it won't work.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
Maybe that's because you have no clue of how OpenID works... How does Microsoft get to know what's going on when I use my Google OpenID to sign into StackOverflow, pray tell?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It doesn't have to be a centralized server, it can be federated, like XMPP severs (you can talk to Google Talk/Gmail IM users without having an account in Google's server, for example).
Dilbert RSS feed
Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader.
Used to? What, it no longer serves that function?
It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members.
And still is.
And Facebook realized it owned the network.
ZOMG1!!! I think there is a very strong possibility that Facebook *knew* they owned the thing that runs on their f* infrastructure. Maybe that was part of their business model from day one. Crazy I know!!!
Even crazier to think they just realized that fact </facepalm>
Then Facebook decided to turn "your" profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves.
See above.
Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking.
Yeah, I can see the typical Facebook user (or the typical consumer of web-based information and publication in general) doing just that. This is what happens when geeks project their own experience and worries onto others, thinking others do as they do, and most importantly, care or worry about the same shit they do. They don't.
If such a proposal ever takes place, all it would do is facilitate the creation of new "facebooks" that will wither and die over time. Eventually people will conglomerate to specific venues with functionality and ethos that appeal to them, run not by a collective of selfless enthusiast but by people who put the time and money to make it happen (and that won't happen just out of charity.)
Talking about missing the entire point of human communication.
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?"
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
This is what Eben Moglen calls for in his lecture about freedom in the cloud http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson