Slashdot Mirror
A Call For an Open, Distributed Alternative To Facebook
qwerty8ytrewq writes "Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, claims that Facebook has gone rogue: 'Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. ... And Facebook realized it owned the network. Then Facebook decided to turn "your" profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.' Singel goes on to call for an open, distributed alternative. 'Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish. Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking.' Can Slashdotters predict where social networking is going? And how?"
Relatedly, jamie points out a graphical representation of how Facebook's privacy settings have changed over the last five years.
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.
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.
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 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.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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.
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 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.
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.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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
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.
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.
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think you've got it completely wrong.
My wife talks to her parents on facebook more than she does her friends from highschool.
The paradigm of communications and interactions on facebook are fundamentally different from the hand written letter, from the phone call, from the email, from the text message, from the face-to-face one on one, and from the hanging out in a physical space.
People use facebook differently to communicate than they use all of those things.
They are not looking to invent new technologies to segment themselves from prior generations. It's not like kids have STOPPED texting because of facebook.
Compare the attributes of various communications mechanisms. Single-cast vs. Multi-cast. Real-time interactive vs. store-and-forward. Immediate feedback vs. delayed feedback. Error-correction deferred response vs. errors sent in-band. Persisted by default vs. volitile by default. Single-media vs. multi-media. Collaborative response vs. isolated response.
Facebook has different attributes vs. a phone call, an email, an SMS, hanging out in person, etc. People use it differently.
For instance, there is no way for a kid to use a phone to do a 1:many broadcast of 5 lines of text of how they are feeling _right now_, and to get group-visible/collaborative responses on a time-disparate basis. (well, unless their phone can update facebook -- which many can).
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.