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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
And on a larger scale, we have highly proprietary mobile devices (foremost Apple) displacing PCs altogether.
But all that involves a lot of work. Facebook got popular because it made it easy.
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.