Creating a Better Facebook

Fed up with Facebook's insatiable need to continue to expose your personal information to ever widening circles, four NYU students have decided to build an open source, distributed competitor to the social networking behemoth. They've raised a few grand, but I imagine it will be harder to convince your mom to log in.

Comments

Social networks

[sopssa]

Unfortunately Facebook's power is in that everyone uses it, and that is what they use to get new users too. Alternative projects are a humble goal, but especially with social networks you are quite much locked in to a single existing network just because everyone else you know uses it, and they in turn use it because you use it too.

Interestingly creating a network like this means you have convince everyone to forget about Facebook and move to this platform. Even if it would become successful, once these four students have millions of people in their social network, they most likely will change it the same way that Facebook did. Remember that Facebook also was a hobby project made by students.

Re:Social networks

[ThePangolino]

The difference is that Diaspora is to be released under the aGPL license. Making it free software. Free as in both free speech and free beer probably.

Re:Social networks

[epiphani]

Its been done before - facebook is the new myspace is the new yahoo chat is the new geocities.

If they get their idea nailed down well, with a clean, easy user interface and a simple deployment mechanism and method for growth with privacy in tact, they may have a shot at it.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly creating a network like this means you have convince everyone to forget about Facebook and move to this platform.

I disagree. It might be enough to convince a few universities or a small area to switch. From there it will spread.
Craigslist & a lot of sites started off in a small area then spread quickly.

Re:Social networks

[sopssa]

I think you missed the point. Even if it is aGPL, how do you convince everyone, your friends, sisters, parents, relatives and so on to use it? Social network isn't good if you can't use it for, well socializing. For that you need everyone else to use it too.

Re:Social networks

[Rallias Ubernerd]

They hit slashdot. They will become major in a few days. Don't worry. This one will actually succede!

Re:Social networks

[MBGMorden]

All true, but things get harder and harder as the user bases in question grow. Geocities used to popular for example, but it's user base never encountered anything remotely resembling what Facebook currently has. It's the digital equivalent of inertia.

Re:Social networks

[Fnkmaster]

People said the same thing about Friendster, for certain values of "everyone" at the time that Facebook started up. They said that MySpace was toast and that Friendster was taking off. Then Friendster just let the whole thing rot and people moved en masse to Facebook. It turned out it wasn't really that hard to pick up and move your social networking to another site - because really, most of the historical content was either not that relevant or not that hard to move.

Now, Facebook has tried hard to make that less true with features with tagging of images that build up their own database of historical information that is a bit harder to move over to another site.

But the reality is that like a club or social venue, the crowds can pick up and move to a new place when the last place becomes passe. And when your grandmother and your parents are all on Facebook, it's safe to say it's less cool than it used to be. More people, but because that network is now *so* broad, from people you went to school with, people you work with, your family, your parents, your kids, etc. it's hard to share anything but the lowest common denominator of information on there, especially with their continual stream of privacy gaffes. Which makes it distinctly less useful to many of us - more like a public website, less like a way to share information with friends.

People can pick up and move to other social networking venues. They aren't realistically going to abandon Facebook of course, but they can add a new social networking venue and just not update their Facebook profiles as much. That's what I did with Friendster. Then after a while, when you notice that nobody else is updating their Friendster profiles either, it stops being interesting going there. As a result, I haven't logged in for probably two years now, but it was a slow withdrawal process.

Don't overestimate the strength of Facebook's network effect. It's there, but it's not all-powerful. Shit on your customers for a while and alternatives will pop up, it's inevitable. I have no idea who will "win" in the long run and I don't think Facebook is going away anytime soon, but there is certainly still room for new entrants.

I think the key is that "openness" in and of itself isn't a feature. There needs to be more of a killer feature to get people to try something new. An open social networking framework is geek-cool, but if there are one or two things you can functionally accomplish there that Facebook can't or doesn't offer, that will get people to sample the new product and consider adopting it.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

I could certainly see a market for something like the old facebook. University students only. No moms, no thirteen-year-olds, no third cousins and grade school 'friends', and no future bosses to see your boobie blouse beer bong pictures and interpersonal drama.

However that has zilch to do with "distributed" and "open source"

Re:Social networks

[sopssa]

And once they have grown, they will use the project to make money. Not only because they'd like it, but they would need to employ 1000+ employees, pay them every month and get the money for that. Actually this is exactly the same way how Facebook started.

They will make humble promises now so that they actually have even some change in creating their social network, but once it becomes large social network it will work just the same way like every other social network out there.

Re:Social networks

[gox]

Well, if it's distributed, and open-source, and popular enough, at some point they should lose all /direct/ control over it. If this is not likely from the beginning, there's no point in using it, though I suspect the goal is just that.

If it works, we nerds would start using it out of curiosity. If it proves helpful, it could grow.

Re:Social networks

[Aeros]

Then we will have to start up a *NEW* social networking site that promises privacy..

Re:Social networks

[epiphani]

You obviously didn't read the article. They're trying to build a decentralized, p2p-style facebook application.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

You're completely missing the point. It's distributed network and even you could host a node.
You would own your own data.

Re:Social networks

[IntlHarvester]

The main reason Friendster died-off was because it couldn't scale up. After it hit a certain level of popularity, you couldn't even visit the site without it spewing MySQL errors or hanging for a minute on every page load. Meanwhile, they launched some half-baked plan to rewrite the whole thing in Java, while people were bailing from the site out of frustration.

The other interesting thing about Friendster was the "friend-of-a-friend" privacy model. Which means if you weren't somehow connected to the active userbase, it did seem like a ghost town. That sort of model has its advantages, but it did limit network effects and probably accelerated the hipster effect of becoming too popular.

Re:Social networks

[Hylandr]

Dunno, facebook did a pretty good number on myspace.

Then again, myspace kind of did that to itself with the barrage of ads apparently geared to the nickelodeon crowd...

- Dan.

Re:Social networks

[NickFortune]

Geocities used to popular for example, but it's user base never encountered anything remotely resembling what Facebook currently has.

Then again, MySpace did have a userbase comparable to Facebook. And yet it seems to have gone from being the the place to be to "are you still on myspace?" in a very short space of time.

If social networks function in the same way as (say) eBay, then you'd be right. In that case the size of the user base is itself a resource that draws in more users. But suppose there's a different dynamic at work. Suppose it functions like a fashion accessory. Then users could prove a lot more fickle that you'd expect.

A lot of the people driving adoption for new networks are kids. Then the parents follow so they can keep an eye on the children. Before long everyone's on the new network, and aside from a few die-hards, no-one wants to be seen dead on the old sites. And then the kids start looking for a place to hang out that their mums don't know about, and a new generation is coming up that doesn't want anything to do with what their big sister thinks is cool...

I could be wrong, of course. But it would explain why none of the previous social networks have managed translate users into longevity.

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

I really don't get this. Everyone seems to be talking about Diaspora, which is still vaporware, when there are actual products that work right now. You can either go with the StatusNet + plugins route (implementing OStatus), or you can choose OneSocialWeb (XMPP+extensions). Both are Free software. OSW is Apache licensed, FFS: how much more could you ask for?

Both of these products actually exist and work now. StatusNet is mature. OSW is still alpha, but fairly complete. It would be much better for everyone to hitch their wagons to one of these than to support some college students who may or may not know what they're doing and whose goal appears to be to "scrape Twitter and Flickr." That will never work. You have to be able to post status updates, pictures, videos, and blogs all within the same interface and have people be able to comment on or "Like" directly from that same interface. You can't expect people to leave Facebook for something cobbled together from pieces and lacking half the functionality.

I hope I'm wrong about this project.

Re:Social networks

[Cruise_WD]

[quote]Unfortunately Facebook's power is in that everyone uses it, and that is what they use to get new users too. Alternative projects are a humble goal, but especially with social networks you are quite much locked in to a single existing network just because everyone else you know uses it, and they in turn use it because you use it too.[/quote]

Doesn't Facebook have an API? I'm fairly sure you could get a massive head start by allowing you to import contacts from, and cross-communicate with, Facebook via their own API.

The only reason I use facebook is because my friends use facebook. If I could keep the access without ever actually having to use fb itself, I'd be there like a shot.

Re:Social networks

[thepike]

I agree with almost everything you said. People can definitely switch over, it just won't be a one day thing. People are constantly switching from one service to another, but it takes a while for the balance to switch from one to the other.

But I disagree about openness not being a feature. I think the point that could make this take off is that it is open. You get to host your own "node" of the network and choose what information you put on it. That will make it much more difficult to pull a switch like facebook has, at least in theory. Because all the information isn't being hosted on central servers, the main company should have a much more difficult time storing it all forever and saying it isn't yours, which is the main problem with facebook these days.

There is also the potential that if people start leaving for services like this, facebook might shape up a bit. Probably not, but it could happen.

Re:Social networks

[Sancho]

It seems like this is a terrible idea. Decentralization is nice in theory, but it's really hard to do in practice. How do I know where my friends are on dynamic IPs? You either need trackers or some static place to host the data.

If this gains popularity, it will be amongst a few large brokers. A handful of sites will offer Diaspora accounts, and you're in largely the same boat as now except that you can jump ship if one of them becomes tyrannical. Though if you want to keep your friends who are on that server, you'll still be sending your information over. So maybe this is even worse--your information in the hands of several medium-sized companies (any of whom could share it) instead of one large company.

Most likely, though, this will be relegated to geeks and small one- or two-account servers spread out all over the place. If all of your friends are geeks, great. If not, you'll either alienate yourself or stay on with Facebook in order to keep up with them.

Re:Social networks

[AnnoyaMooseCowherd]

They're trying to build a decentralized, p2p-style facebook application.

The problem with facebook is not the centralised nature of the application, but the lack of control a user has over their data and what facebook intend to do with it

In the case of a p2p, decentralised system it is surely even less clear as to where your profile data (embarrasing photos, etc) will actually be stored, who will have access to that data and how can you ensure you can delete it when you want to.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. This story has been bouncing around the tubes for a week and despite all the 'open source' hype involved, slashdot doesn't hear about until after it appears in the NY Times.

Just last week, slashdot was seriously arguing over whether Usenet was dying out -- this is a site where people jerk off to ancient unix crap and ron paul, not where anyone knows or cares about anything new happening on the internet.

Re:Social networks

[Jarik_Tentsu]

Dunno about Friendster, but MySpace was somewhat different to Facebook. Sure, it was insanely popular with younger crowds, but I think the biggest difference was everyone used fake names. So to add someone on MySpace, people would need the person's username - "Hotchick577228" or whatever. On Facebook the norm is to use your real name. This means that people you meet in real life, log onto Facebook and try to add you - almost expecting that you'll have an account. Or at least, it's certainly that way at uni.

The power isn't just that your friends use it, and other people use it, and you can give your username to them. The power of Facebook is the way anyone can search for your real name, with the probability that you have an account, and add you. The only way that's going to change if Facebook dies suddenly due to an external factor (legal, goes bankrupt, etc) and everyone moves to another alternative.

Most people don't care about the sharing of private information really. I mean, the primary reason I signed up was I was sick of not being invited to events (which seemed to be completely planned on facebook). Are you going to protest the way Facebook handles your data by boycotting it, and boycotting half the social events that may pop up over time?

It's no longer about being in this cool, online environment with your friends (MySpace) and more about an expected form of communication and networking - like a mobile phone, email address, etc.

Re:Social networks

[sopssa]

You're completely missing the point. It's distributed network and even you could host a node.
You would own your own data.

So basically like WWW? Then it has even more problems. Normal people don't keep their computers on all the time, and if its distributed via other computers they have access to the private data or its slow like Freenet. A good goal, but people will not put up with it, or otherwise Slashdot would be hosted on freenet too.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Diaspora isn't scraping anything. Facebook isn't the only show in town that gets data from Flickr et al. Friendfeed and Windows Live both do it. Aggregating data from multiple web services -- including Facebook, because Facebook has user RSS feeds -- isn't hard. No reason why Diaspora or anyone else couldn't do it.

Re:Social networks

[longhunt]

This is going back a ways... but it reminds me of the '80s when people were using big dial-up services like Genie and Compuserve... Then hobbyists started writing software to set up a dial-up BBS on a PC. I used to have like 40 people who would regularly call my bbs to read the forums and play games.

The thing was, we could hack and customize our own BBSs to make the way cooler and more individualized than the big services. Potentially, this could be the new Web 2.0 version of that... Then again, maybe its all vaporware.

Re:Social networks

[schon]

you have convince everyone to forget about Facebook and move to this platform.

Why is that, exactly?

What specifically is it about this project (or Facebook) that prohibits people from having accounts on both services at the same time?

Re:Social networks

[FictionPimp]

The same way everyone got sucked into myspace, then facebook, then twitter, etc. If it's good people will use it and they will invite their friends.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because every Jabber user is forced to run their own XMPP server.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The entire perceived 'problem' with Facebook is that they are decentralizing your data to third party sites rather than keeping it locked up on your profile page. So the solution is to further decentralize?

People who can't manage their facebook privacy settings are certainly not going to be able to manage profile replication and multiple privacy policies. Oh, but they can audit the source code :rolleyes:.

Re:Social networks

[Quantumplation]

No no, not at all. Do a bit of research on Distributed Hash Tables. They allow a vast storage and distribution of data, without the need for ANY kind of centralized server. If you know one person who's online, you connect and get integrated into the network. You can then cache large numbers (several thousands) of IP's who are online, and sort them by some sort of self published "uptime" statistic. Then, you have a very high probability of being able to connect to the network in the future.

Likewise, a single server that says "Here are a couple people online, go talk to them to connect to the network" is far better than a centralized server that says "Here's all your data, and your friends data. Oh, and I'm giving your data away in large quantities."

Re:Social networks

[Fnkmaster]

Interesting - OneSocialWeb looks like it has some promise to me. StatusNet seems like it's aimed at a somewhat different role, though it clearly exists already, and I see that there's overlap.

OneSocialWeb needs to make sampling easy - open source is great, but just proclaiming the potential benefits and sticking up source code on a website isn't going to draw people, even geeky people like me, in. This is all still too early or too feature-incomplete to say "here it is, don't bother Diaspora guys, it's already been done".

I realize OneSocialWeb is alpha at this point, but installing your own XMPP server etc. is a relatively high hurdle for setting up an online community.

It has to be easy to try out joining a community AND easy to set up your own community that links into the overall social network if you want to attract even the early adopter types who will then contribute back code and features to the community. The first "open social web" project to hit that critical mass point will probably get some real traction.

Re:Social networks

[Lumpy]

facebook did it with Myspace. They pulled the majority of their users to facebook. the next big thing will suck facebook dry as well.

Re:Social networks

[Bing Tsher E]

I could be wrong, of course. But it would explain why none of the previous social networks have managed translate users into longevity.

My theory is that the marketing fucks show up, and as soon as that happens, the site is as good as dead.

I mean, the fricking 'Fashion Bug' store in the little strip mall in the small town I live near has 'We are on Facebook' stickers on the door now. The 'Fashion Bug' in case anybody isn't aware of it, is a clothing store that has about the same image in fashion as Radio Shack does in tech.

Facebook is over. Or, it's just the new Montgomery Wards.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but people didn't have such a place yet at the time. It will be more difficult now that Facebook is a de facto gathering place.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

In response to "don't overestimate the strength of Facebook's network effect":

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

That is all.

Re:Social networks

[Lumpy]

"because really, most of the historical content was either not that relevant or not that hard to move."

It's because it's not that relevant. Moving it not a problem because photos people already have on their pc.

People really dont care about things that are more than 3 days old on social network sites.

Re:Social networks

[M. Baranczak]

From the Diaspora website:

"Our current implementations include GPG encryption, scraping Twitter and Flickr, [...]"

Re:Social networks

[couchslug]

Just use a dummy profile and tell your friends (offline) to use email for most comm.

My Facebook page tells visitors that it's light on info because it's not more than a point of contact.

Re:Social networks

[M. Baranczak]

If it's done right, then various multiple social platforms can work together, instead of competing. That was supposed to be the goal of the OpenSocial API (which is implemented by OneSocialWeb, among others).

Re:Social networks

[Nevynxxx]

On Facebook the norm is to use your real name.

Actually it's in the T&Cs, one reason I held out so long was that I didn't want to use my real name. now I have an account, in breach of those T&Cs.

# Registration and Account Security Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:

1. You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.

2. You will not create more than one personal profile.

3. If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission.

4. You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).

5. You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.

6. You will not use Facebook if you are a convicted sex offender.

7. You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.

8. You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.

9. You will not transfer your account (including any page or application you administer) to anyone without first getting our written permission.

10. If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user's actual name).

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

What specifically is it about this project (or Facebook) that prohibits people from having accounts on both services at the same time?

Are you really that naive, or are you just playing stupid?

Re:Social networks

[icebraining]

I think it should be more like email; most people use free services, but there's two advantages:

1) There are plenty of free services, so people can switch to a better one (including paying for one like some people do with email, to ensure privacy/reliability)
2) Privacy aware geeks like us can host our own.

Like with email, the most important thing is not the software, but the protocol: we need something that can be federated, so servers can talk to each other.

I was hoping that Wave would fill in the gap (it's an open federated protocol), but it's not a real social network in the style of FB, it's more like a revamped email/IRC.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

You really need to read the article.

You'll host your data on your server, so there'll be no p2p stuff going on on dynamic IPs. It's p2p between servers, not in the same way bittorrent works.

This is the real problem they need to solve - how non-techies can get set up. But presumably you'll be able to have 3rd parties providing hosting like with wordpress.

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

I realize that more has to be done to StatusNet than to XMPP to make a usable social network, and that they come at it from different angles, but both have key pieces already in place -- federation (which is hard), security, status, profiles, and plug-ins -- so I think either could be taken to the Facebook point with much less effort than starting a new project.

I especially like the XMPP route because some providers already offer this service, and that means more leverage over FB. For example, GMail already offers both XMPP (GTalk) and Buzz, so adapting to the OpenSocial API would be fairly easy. Yahoo! will have more trouble, but it may find itself squeezed out of the webmail business if Y! doesn't make a move and FB continues to push into that market.

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

Agreed. I wish they'd all just sit down and hammer out a spec before getting three competing and incompatible "competitors" to FB.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS: how much more could you ask for?

marketing buzz.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, MySpace did have a userbase comparable to Facebook. And yet it seems to have gone from being the the place to be to "are you still on myspace?" in a very short space of time.

I think I know what to do: We need to get Rupert Murdoch to buy Facebook.

Re:Social networks

[0100010001010011]

You don't "convince them" you tell them that's where they can find the latest photos of last weekend, their wedding, their grandkids, you, etc. If they want to see them, they get an account.

Not saying they haven't already thought of it, but if they were smart they'd add a google calendar/evite type 'event' planner where all you need is an e-mail account, not a Diaspora account.

The thing they need most is a name that's not "diaspora" the streak of horribly named open source projects continued.

Re:Social networks

[Fnkmaster]

Sorry, that's not the point. I am well aware of the large size of FB's userbase - and I'm guessing you may work for FB. The size of a network is only part of the equation - the bigger part is the switching costs.

For example, nearly everybody uses Google right now - the userbase is huge, but the network effects keeping people stuck there are relatively minimal. They use Google because it's been the best for some time now and they are used to using it. But it wouldn't take much to get some people to overcome that inertia and start switching. That's why Google has rushed around spending money on other projects, invested in building a mobile platform, and so on. They know that search, in and of itself, doesn't guarantee users will stick with Google and protect their advertising profit margins. But Gmail and Android and Google Calendar and Chrome and Firefox search placement so on - these other services that Google has been in a frenzied panic to roll out over the last few years are the ways they plan to hold on to userbase in the face of competitive threats to the core search business, and to make it harder to totally switch away from Google.

I'll give you an example of a more indirect, but much stronger network effect - the near-monopoly Microsoft has enjoyed due to the installed base of Windows leading to a huge Windows legacy application base and the installed base of Office leading to a huge number of Office documents in every company and on nearly every computer out there. The duration of this effect has been rather staggering - Windows has basically owned the PC market for years now, and has basically owned the office software market. Switching costs are huge if you can't read your existing Word docs or run your legacy apps.

When Facebook is still the dominant social networking platform and is a 100 billion dollar company 20 years from now, I will concede that the network effects were strong indeed and admit that I was wrong on this.

Re:Social networks

[novium]

I don't necessarily agree with this. I think that the number of people already on facebook is definitely an obstacle, but just look at its own history. You just need to create momentum, which is difficult to do but not impossible. When I first joined facebook, hardly anyone I knew outside of one specific circle of friends were on it. But I would tell my other friends about it, and eventually they'd try it out, and presumably do the same to others. I don't doubt it would change, but I doubt it would change like facebook did, at least in regards to privacy. The set-up alone would make that seem like a non-starter. All facebook needed to do was change its TOS. That doesn't seem like it'd work here. What I think their biggest challenge is going to be is to make it as easy to use/join as the more centralized social networks. Anything that starts out by saying "allows you to set up your own node" is going to turn off a vast majority of people.

Re:Social networks

[adamofgreyskull]

Probably trolling, but there are social networks, like Faceparty, MySpace, LiveJournal and Friendster that pre-date Facebook. Apart from Faceparty, which was a fairly UK specific site, at some point those were all the place to be. This is all very recent history, ~10 years..I'd expect ignorance like this from some 13 year old on Facebook, but on /.? There was a time when a lot of people would have scoffed at something that could usurp MySpace. Can anything beat Facebook?

There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful. The boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "How terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't cause his legs all messed up. and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful."

Re:Social networks

[Da_Biz]

I'm going to replace a few words from the OP, using a little story from 1977:

Unfortunately IBM's power is in that everyone uses it, and that is what Big Blue uses to get new users too. Personal computers are a humble goal, but especially with centralized computing you are quite much locked in to a single computing architecture just because everyone else you know uses it, and they in turn use it because you use it too.

Interestingly creating personal computing means you have convince everyone to forget about IBM and move to this platform. Even if it would become successful, once these Two Steves have millions of end users, they most likely will change it the same way that IBM did. Remember that transistors also was a hobby project made by somebody.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like this is a terrible idea. Decentralization is nice in theory, but it's really hard to do in practice. How do I know where my friends are on dynamic IPs? You either need trackers or some static place to host the data.

So...distributed trackers then?

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Twitter & Flickr both have RSS feeds *and* an API, I'm sure they're being idiomatic in their use of "scrape". There is no Earthly reason any app would need to scrape Twitter. Or Flickr.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with facebook is it's run by people without scruples and used by people who don't understand the implications.

You have no control over embarrassing photoes, etc, now, because unless you have very long arms, most likely it was someone else who took that photo, and it's up to them where it goes.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, you can use that water in the garden....

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with facebook is not the centralised nature of the application, but the lack of control a user has over their data and what facebook intend to do with it

And you're too stupid to connect the dots?

Re:Social networks

[Nerdfest]

P2P, decentralized, or managed by FaceBook, as soon as anyone, including your "friends" has a copy of your data, you've lost control of it, and there is really no way to regain it.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

This is unfortunately exactly correct.

I boycotted Facebook, until I realized it was negatively effecting my social life. Then I created an account with a fake name. It helped, but I was still getting excluded because few people knew my fake name. A lot of people seem to friend people their friends are already friends with after they meet them in some social context. That would never happen to me because they didn't see my actual name on their friends friend list.

I finally gave in and created a Facebook account with my real name (and no other personal info). Within a week I was plugged in to all my friends networks of friends. I get invited to events all the time now, friends who never emailed will write on my Facebook wall, I am no longer "out of sight, out of mind". I meet new people and we get to know each other via Facebook updates, we get invited to the same events because of mutual friends, we become friends. It's had a noticeably positive effect on my social life.

Basically, what it comes down to is that Facebook has leverage over your social life now. It's ingrained itself into our culture in a way that no previous social networking website has. With MySpace you didn't have to be a member if you wanted to get invited to the bar with your friends. With Facebook you have to be a member or else you will become unintentionally ostracized.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

In the case of a p2p, decentralised system

Is it P2P though? Or are you assuming that decentralized also means p2p?

I wouldn't be surprised if decentralized in this case means a number of independently run servers that just know how to pass some data and authentication tokens back and forth. Sort of like some combination of OpenID+RSS+blogging software+extra magic.

Re:Social networks

[buswolley]

where's the new Google?

Re:Social networks

[Mr_Silver]

The problem with facebook is not the centralised nature of the application, but the lack of control a user has over their data and what facebook intend to do with it

What I find interesting is that in a lot of cases, facebook actually gives you more control over what information about you is shared by others than people here realise.

For example, one of my friends runs his own photo album on his own server with over 10,000 pictures all tagged with everyone's names and cross referenced. If I want to get my name removed from a photo, I have to email him, ask him and hope that he does it.

If his photos were on Facebook, I could remove myself in three clicks.

Re:Social networks

[drooling-dog]

Are you going to protest the way Facebook handles your data by boycotting it, and boycotting half the social events that may pop up over time?

The beauty (tragedy?) of FB and sites like it is that they've convinced us to turn over the management of our social lives and public identities to a private business, in exchange for... well, we're not quite sure what, yet. In the beginning it's a convenience, but then you find you can't have friends at all without them.

And these people who won't invite you to their "events" if they have to shoot you an email... You call them "friends"?

Re:Social networks

[rudy_wayne]

Then again, MySpace did have a userbase comparable to Facebook. And yet it seems to have gone from being the the place to be to "are you still on myspace?" in a very short space of time. If social networks function in the same way as (say) eBay, then you'd be right. In that case the size of the user base is itself a resource that draws in more users. But suppose there's a different dynamic at work. Suppose it functions like a fashion accessory. Then users could prove a lot more fickle that you'd expect.

Social networking is very much a fad, like a "fashion accessory".

Geocities --> Yahoo --> Live Journal --> My Space

At one time, each one of these was very popular. It was "the place to be". Then the popularity died out as people moved on to the "the next big thing". Facebook is currently "the place to be" but the last 10 years suggests that it won't last.

Re:Social networks

[BrokenHalo]

The thing they need most is a name that's not "diaspora" the streak of horribly named open source projects continued.

I have no opinion about the merits or demerits of Diaspora, but forums (fora?) thrive or survive on what fills a given purpose at a given time. Take Slashdot, for instance. This is focused towards those of us with what is essentially a 1990s mindset, with marginal respect paid to the thrills and spills of the so-called "Web 2.0" junk peddled by other sites.

Facebook is for now the leader among these fora, since it ostensibly offers many people (I am not among their number) the kind of connectivity that they seem to want right now. But nobody should be surprised if Facebook gets supplanted by something else if it becomes seen to be lacking in something (e.g. security or privacy safeguards) regarded as necessary. It's all part of the normal rise and fall of eminence in software (as in other things). Evolution happens online just as much as in meat-space.

Re:Social networks

[Al Dimond]

That isn't how Facebook started at all. Mark Zuckerberg was one of those people who was either going to get rich or scam a lot of people trying. He's managed to get rich, and at least be complicit in scamming a lot of people, so I'd say he's lived a pretty successful life.

What I'm talking about is that he was contracted to help build a similar site by some other people and deliberately sandbagged the work so he could build his own instead. Then he hacked into the email accounts of editors of the Harvard student paper for some reason I don't remember. Now he's exploiting his user base at every turn. The point is that Facebook was never a cute community project -- the goal from the beginning was to make lots of money. And that doesn't take a long, sustained success. Facebook will eventually fall; by that time the people that got in on the ground floor will have diversified their investments, and will never have to work again (unless the economy collapses really hard, which is always a possibility).

It's certainly possibly that a site started up with the best intentions could turn into the next Facebook. Similarly it's possible that a government started with the best intentions could turn into the next Stalinist Russia. Governments can try to limit their own power in constitutions but ultimately it comes down to people to make sure the government stays limited -- similarly, this new project can build in technical obstacles to central accumulation of power, but ultimately it comes down to the project's future leaders to make sure that it sticks with its principles.

Re:Social networks

[Requiem18th]

No need for everybody to join.

I've already said that I'm in the market for something like this. I want to share some things with my close friends, links videos and status updates like twitter, without the feeling that I'm being psychologically profiled by a government of another country.

I don't have to make my friends *switch* from facebook, Half of my friends don't even like facebook because they are like me, I suspect that would be the case for many users of such a service.

The other half of my friends who use facebook can still use it.

I'm talking of about 4-6 friends, I have a small circle of friends, the rest are acquaintances (including family members) and my acquaintances already know I hate facebook.

About the only problem with this is that facebook will surely make an app "Give facebook your PrivateLife password and get a cute picture of a puppy representing your personality"

If one of my two friends who do use facebook fall for that then again I'd be exposed, but the risk is lower as my friends are not that dumb.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... public key encryption might mitigate your worries. Not sure how to revoke privileges, and key exchanges would have to be done privately, but from then on you don't need to worry so much about who has your data in transmission. Then YOU decide who gets to read your data. I think the problem is fairly complex (by my simple assessment), but it COULD work, and trying to figure out these problems is worth the effort to protect peoples privacy, rather than just throwing up your hands and saying it will never work, so just stick with FB.

Re:Social networks

[AnnoyaMooseCowherd]

You really need to read the article.

I did

You'll host your data on your server, so there'll be no p2p stuff going on on dynamic IPs. It's p2p between servers, not in the same way bittorrent works.

Ah, so the millions of people who currently use facebook will get themselves a server with a static ip address and set up and maintain their own copy of the new system? ...nope, can't see any major problems there.

This is the real problem they need to solve - how non-techies can get set up. But presumably you'll be able to have 3rd parties providing hosting like with wordpress.

Oh right, so lots of third parties will host the user's data? Doesn't this bring us back to the point I made regarding who knows who those third parties are and who has access to the user data they now control instead of facebook?

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

But what's the point if nobody uses it? The last thing on anyone's mind when using Facebook (or any other social networking) is whether the software that runs it is 'free as in speech'. They mainly care where their friends are there or not. If the people on an Open Source social networking site are anything like those on a Linux forum, then no sane person would want to go there anyway.

Re:Social networks

[Al Dimond]

Diaspora is a fine name. Crack a damn dictionary. So it's a four-syllable word that a lot of people don't know. It's also an actual word that has to do with the purpose of the site. So I think it's a fine name, but I also don't think it matters; if the site is good people will learn it.

A lot of open source projects have dumb names. All the KDE apps named as words with Gs replaced with Ks, and vice-versa with Gnome apps. The Crips and Bloods do the same thing, it's absolute silliness. Firefox is a pretty stupid and meaningless name (Mozilla is also meaningless, but at least it sounds cool). And that hasn't stopped its success.

Re:Social networks

[Greg_D]

Yeah, I have no idea what those Google guys were thinking. The market was clearly saturated with search engines at the time.

Re:Social networks

[AnnoyaMooseCowherd]

P2P, decentralized, or managed by FaceBook, as soon as anyone, including your "friends" has a copy of your data, you've lost control of it, and there is really no way to regain it.

I agree, but the message that the article seems to suggest is that it is only Facebook that we need to worry about and if only your data was being looked after by someone else, using free, open source software, that the problems with regards to data security go away.

Not only does this seem to miss the point, but ignores the fact that, should you wish to delete your profile using the new improved system, rather than go to one centralised point, it is likely that you would have to track down all the copies shared with all the servers that host your friends' accounts.

Re:Social networks

[coaxial]

People who can't manage their facebook privacy settings are certainly not going to be able to manage profile replication and multiple privacy policies. Oh, but they can audit the source code :rolleyes:.

Oh please. The whole thing is encrypted with GPG. It doesn't matter who has the data, as long as they can't read it.

Re:Social networks

[aeoo]

Unfortunately Facebook's power is in that everyone uses it

That used to be MySpace's power. Oh wait...

Re:Social networks

[AnnoyaMooseCowherd]

Um... public key encryption might mitigate your worries. Not sure how to revoke privileges, and key exchanges would have to be done privately, but from then on you don't need to worry so much about who has your data in transmission. Then YOU decide who gets to read your data.

I'm less worried about who might see the data in transmission than I am about who gets access to it and the various copies shared with my friends. Unless I host my own profile and that of everyone I allow access to my profile, there will be people with copies of my profile data on their servers.

How do I know who those people are and how do I control what they do with the copies of my data they now have?

Re:Social networks

[blackraven14250]

In the case of a p2p, decentralised system it is surely even less clear as to where your profile data (embarrasing photos, etc) will actually be stored, who will have access to that data and how can you ensure you can delete it when you want to.

You assume that the project doesn't keep each person's profile on their own machine, with only name + main photo on machines of friends.

Re:Social networks

[mwvdlee]

facebook = face + book, two words every 4 year old knows.

diaspora = di + a + spo + ra??? what? something you need to "crack a damn dictionary" for?

It's not a fine name. Call it something simple like "mylife" or "aboutme" or whatever. Something a first-grader knows how to spell upon hearing it.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

The power isn't just that your friends use it, and other people use it, and you can give your username to them. The power of Facebook is the way anyone can search for your real name, with the probability that you have an account, and add you.

Yeah, that was wonderful back 2 years ago or whenever networks and college-related info was still searchable so it was actually possible to find people by a method other than reading through the friends lists of people you expect them to be friends with.

Re:Social networks

[aztracker1]

The fact is that most people don't care about privacy policies until they are affected. Also, I think it'd just be better to think in terms of putting anything onto a site you don't control means it's pretty close to public information. Exceptions being to those companies you actually have a financial relationship with. IE they make their money from you, vs. from the advertisers and marketers, and marketing applications running through your service. Where the money comes from is always a driving force.

Re:Social networks

[mwvdlee]

Something like this needs to be P2P without having to rely on any single corporation-owned server, and it needs to have open + free (as in beer) standards for everything. It needs to be out of the control of corporate life.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

actually plenty of idiots use facebook as their personal photoalbum (400+ pics) and DON'T keep their own copies, or lose them, computer crash, reformat, etc. etc. and there's no easy way to get them all OFF facebook so...

Re:Social networks

[hey]

Whats a Google, Yahoo, Bing?
Actually, if I understand it right Diaspora is the engine and people can make websites (called whatever they want) that use it.

Re:Social networks

[AnnoyaMooseCowherd]

You assume that the project doesn't keep each person's profile on their own machine, with only name + main photo on machines of friends.

If the project does work in the way you suggest, this would mean that the millions of people who currently use Facebook would have to be capable of setting up their own, always on servers and maintaining their own copy of the project.

That might be fine for you and me, but the most likely scenario is that some more technically able people will set up severs and offer to host other (less able?) peoples' profiles. If this is the case, who are these people and can they be trusted with the data any more than Facebook?

Re:Social networks

[DarrenBaker]

I don't think he was complaining that he didn't understand it. It's a poorly marketable name. Sounds like a pill for incontinence.

Re:Social networks

[DarrenBaker]

Sites that succeeded despite, not because of, their easy-to-pronounce single or double-syllable names.

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

P2P is a unnecessary. Federated servers would be good enough. Right now, you can set up your own Jabber server and talk to GTalk users, so people who want independence can have it, but the people who aren't familiar with computers can just get a Google account.

Federation (S2S) is a win for everyone. P2P is much more difficult to create and has few benefits.

Re:Social networks

[0100010001010011]

All are one or two syllable words that are easily phonetically spelled.

goo gle
ya hoo
bing

Not just that they're easy to remember if you see it once.

Right off the bat, without the dictionary, I'm not sure if it's Dee-a or Die-a. Then depending on accent it could be -spur-a or -spore-a. FaceBook (although it did used to be myfacebook), myspace, everything is freaking easy to remember, type and say. Imagine yelling 'diaspora' over a crowded bar.

Re:Social networks

[bhtooefr]

And that's the point of Diaspora - open standards, and as little central control as possible (preferably zero.)

(Although, looking at the other reply to your post, Diaspora is really S2S, not P2P, but anyone can set up a server, so it's somewhere between the two.)

Re:Social networks

[AnnoyaMooseCowherd]

Oh please. The whole thing is encrypted with GPG. It doesn't matter who has the data, as long as they can't read it.

That's fine, as long as no one can read your profile data, they can't misuse it.

Having said that though, if no one can read it, its not going to be very useful in a social network site where people being able to read it is pretty much the point.

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

Google's the new Google. You don't see them becoming Stereotypical Mega-Corp yet, do you?

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

Someone pointed out to me that creating a Facebook app to export photos, blogs, friends, and the rest to a new social network might be a possibility. I don't know if Facebook's policies allow them to deny such an app, but I would guess that doing so would fall pretty clearly into anti-competitive territory. If all the competing services exposed the same API, the app would only need to be written once.

Re:Social networks

[Eli Gottlieb]

Am I actually the only person who thinks that the name "Diaspora" sucks because it means "large-scale exile from one's homeland"?

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

I believe this is why the "new Facebook" needs to go beyond where FB is now and have identity integrated into browsers (of course with multiple profiles available and an anonymous mode). If average people were able to use one account to connect to and comment on any webstie (OpenAuth powered) without needing to create an account or enter OpenID URLs, there would be incentive to switch. If Moz and Goog put this in their browsers, you would have 30% coverage out of the gate.

Re:Social networks

[coaxial]

They way I understand it, when you "friend" someone, you're giving them a key to unlock a certain part of the profile.

Perhaps you're just confused by Facebook's "everyone sees everything" privacy model. ;)

Re:Social networks

[King_TJ]

Very true ... but I'd also point out that Facebook is achieving "staying power" by letting 3rd. party software interact with it. For example, Apple's iPhoto software allows automatic uploading of photo collections to Facebook with a single click. These things make Facebook feel more like a "free hosting service" than just another expendable social networking site. It becomes the vested interest of MANY people for their site to stay online, because otherwise, functionality in other software packages is broken or reduced.

(YouTube has done the same thing, with many video editing packages supporting one-click movie uploads.)

And regarding the "sharing of private information", I think there are varying degrees of "private". You can't really lump it all into one category. Your basic information (such as your first and last name, city and state you live in, and even a basic head-shot photo of yourself) are really not that big a deal to publish for the world to see. Unless you live underground in some secret building and use an alias every time you communicate with people, anyone who cares can EASILY gather this same data about you, Facebook or not. Going beyond that, you get into details of your daily life - which vary wildly in how "safe" they may be to publish online. I don't think it's going to matter if you update your status to tell people you tried a certain type of Campbell's soup and really like it, or that you just got back from taking your kid out to a movie. On the other hand, it's proven to be detrimental to one's employment prospects to post drunk/high pictures of oneself, or to talk/brag about illegal activities one might have taken part in. Other details (like telling everyone you're going to be gone on vacation for 2 weeks) might not be as harmless as they seem. Potentially, you just announced that your home is safe to burglarize because nobody will be home for a while....

I like Facebook and find it entertaining AND useful, but I always try to be cautious what I put up there. Jokes are fine, for example, except I try to refrain from posting any that might be taken the wrong way and offend certain people in my "friends" list. I post a lot of political content and make commentary on some of it, because I welcome intelligent debate on those topics and hope I've managed to nudge others to actually *care* about certain things going on around them. But understandably, this could be "risky" material for others to post, depending on their job situation, etc.

Re:Social networks

[Panaflex]

You know who those people are, because you exchanged keys with that person. If you host your data on your own server, or ostensibly, at least the links to that data on another server - then you can control who gets there in the first instance.

Of course, once they have given them a right to a copy then they have it. That data could be kept encrypted with your key, which they would need to retrieve to view it again - but there's no guarantee there as that is essentially DRM.

Re:Social networks

[techhead79]

if you give them the key for that data then the data is again free to anyone that has the key. Hardly anything secure. The only way to ensure secure communication would be either to encrypt the data from A for just person B's key. Or have a method to encrypt the data again on the stored server using person's B's public key...but again you'd need to decrypt the data first for that and doing that on a remote server you have no control over again puts the data at risk. Point is the second the data leaves your node it is no longer yours the second you hand the key to anyone...and this ignores the obvious issue of the data still being out there with no way to revoke it in which time will surely solve the problem of someone trying to look at data without the key. A 1024 GPG key today is great and all but will it be 10 years from now?

The bottom line is without a centralized server that has control over the data or is known and accepted as "trusted"...the only thing that keeps the data secure is the difficulty in reaching it...I give it a year before wide spread viruses and spam take it over.

Re:Social networks

[Abstrackt]

This is the real problem they need to solve - how non-techies can get set up. But presumably you'll be able to have 3rd parties providing hosting like with wordpress.

Ironically, Facebook could be one of those third parties.

Re:Social networks

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

It used to be true that everyone used Myspace, now no one uses it. A good way to take over Facebook would be to integrate with it just like Google integrates with Microsoft products.

Re:Social networks

[novium]

Actually, I remember Diaspora being discussed a few weeks ago here when someone asked for an alternative to Facebook. At the time, they'd only raised about ~1,000 dollars, so it must have been pretty soon after they started looking for donations.

Re:Social networks

[bhtooefr]

You might not use something that you know is called "Diaspora," but you might use a social networking site that uses it.

I can almost guarantee you that most Google Talk users don't know that they're using Jabber, but they're using it.

Re:Social networks

[binary paladin]

One of the differences between then and now is third party integration. My phone integrates into Facebook. My photo storage application integrates into Facebook (tagging and all). The list goes on.

While I'm not going to say that Facebook is invincible, the battle for the social networking space now is far different than it was when Facebook rose to power.

Re:Social networks

[WNight]

The difference is supposed to be that they won't be able to control your experience because you'll run (like a blog, some company will for you) the server yourself.

For getting users into it, just setup spiders that reflect everything from Facebook into the new network until it's got the critical mass to be useful.

As for Facebook's take on that, meh, whatever. Let them rail about people taking their data and reproducing it, would be funny.

Re:Social networks

[WNight]

But then the war comes to them anyways and the boy's mangled legs mean he's no help...?

But, the new warlord is better than the last...

But, this new peace removes the determination to really improve their lot in life...

As for getting people away from Facebook, when a "better" alternative comes around, I know one site you'll be able to spread the word on... It's already guaranteed to have 95% of those interested in such a site on it, and is made for rapid communication between those members.

Facebook is where people will hear about the new site, until they censor it.

Re:Social networks

[Actually, I do RTFA]

And these people who won't invite you to their "events" if they have to shoot you an email... You call them "friends"?

Yes. It's not because of the extra work, its because they start to forget. Then they ask why you didn't show up, never realize that their "facebook invite to all my friends" missed you.

I don't understand why they don't use e-mail lists (my preferred way), but then again I don't understand synchronous texting either.

Re:Social networks

[jafac]

Shit on your customers for a while and alternatives will pop up, it's inevitable.

. . . . unless you're a legislated or legislatively protected monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly/trade-group in your market, (like AT&T(et.al), the FED, the AMA, the RIAA, the MPAA, intel, Microsoft, Clear Channel, - heck, I even think PayPal has some sort of legal protection) -

WRT social networking, I'm not actually aware of any nasty patents or vendor lock-in tricks that Facebook has going on, other than the fact that, for a while, they actually kicked ass. And, I suppose, if they sucked-up to their press competition a little more, and gave away more mindshare, they might not be suffering as much negative press over their privacy policies.

Yes, I'm thinking, they would be "getting away with it" if they weren't somehow playing hardball with potential advertisers. Yes, their mistakes, and their surreptitious policy changes have been horrible. But I think the newsmedia has made a lot more noise about it than they otherwise would have - if they didn't view Facebook as a media COMPETITOR, rather than a partner. (ie. I can join a CNN group, and allow CNN to promote their junk on my Wall, and when I get sick of them, I can HIDE their noise. My guess, is CNN doesn't want me to be able to shut them up so easily).

I do agree that over the past 3-4 months, Facebook's activity/appeal has dwindled. This started to happen independent of the privacy concerns. Most people don't understand or care about the issues beyond a vague sort of - "ooh, that sounds scary". But I think the real issue going on is that they've simply jumped the shark.

Re:Social networks

[SleazyRidr]

Sure, the terms friends is diluted in this setting, but I experienced the same thing. There are loads of people who know me and don't dislike me, but don't really know me well enough that they'd think of me to send an invite to their party. With Facebook, I'm sitting their on their friends list which gives me more opportunities to get invited to things, get to know people better, and develop actual friendships.

Re:Social networks

[michaelhood]

I agree with those points, but I think The Oatmeal recently summed up the need for another Facebook competitor better than I could.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

They have Sucky Names.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Right off the bat, without the dictionary, I'm not sure if it's Dee-a or Die-a. Then depending on accent it could be -spur-a or -spore-a.

Then you are undereducated.

Re:Social networks

[thegarbz]

Facebook, Myspace and Twitter all offer completely different things. There are many people who have accounts on all three. Most of my muso friends on facebook have myspace accounts, and twitter is hardly about social networking (in the sense of here's 100 pictures of what I did on the weekend, come to my party) as much as it is sending a quick message.

Now if you try to replace any single one of those you'll have a hard time finding popularity. Certainly the first question on my mind is why would I want to use this INSTEAD of Facebook. I don't want to have to update yet another social networking page, and the benefit is what to me? Security of my private data? Ok so you'll sign up the 1000000 slashdot users, but where to from there? Who the heck cares about their private data outside of the select group of people who know just how bad it is?

It took me enough convincing to get my sister to switch her facebook profile to friends only.

Re:Social networks

[natophonic]

Meanwhile, they launched some half-baked plan to rewrite the whole thing in Java, while people were bailing from the site out of frustration.

The half-baked plan was to ditch the Java code and rewrite it in PHP, when it's pretty clear the main issue was the way they were representing hierarchical relationships in a SQL relational database (it certainly can be done, but it's easily done poorly).

Either way, it's an excellent example of desperate devs grasping at the straw of "language 'x' sucks, let's rewrite in language 'y'!" and then being disappointed when the switch doesn't spray magick pixie dust curing all their problems.

Re:Social networks

[Joe Random]

But then the war comes to them anyways and the boy's mangled legs mean he's no help...?

But, the new warlord is better than the last...

But, this new peace removes the determination to really improve their lot in life...

But the warlord gives everyone a free frogurt.

But the forgurt is cursed.

But you get your choice of toppings.

But the toppings contain potassium benzoate.

Re:Social networks

[coaxial]

I'm not part of the team, but GPG is a public key encryption method. Part of the plan is that each person hosts their own data on their own "seed." (A wordpress.com like system will exist for people that don't want to host their own data.) From what I understand it works like this:

You encrypt your data with your private key. (Possibly multiple keys to allow multiple granularity of privacy.) Your seed stores other people's encrypted private data as well to ensure availability. When you accept a "friend" request, you transmit the public key directly to the other person's seed. (I assume over yet another encrypted link.) Your "friend" can then request your data from the DHT and then decrypt it.

I just don't understand why you think the replicated data needs to be encrypted yet again, let alone decrypted before being re-encrypted.

I fail to see how a centralized server keeps the data secure. It's just a single point of failure that endangers everyone's data.

A 1024 GPG key today is great and all but will it be 10 years from now?

Now that's a different problem. A problem that's intrinsic to every encryption algorithm.

Re:Social networks

[lennier]

I really don't get this. Everyone seems to be talking about Diaspora, which is still vaporware, when there are actual products that work right now.

There's an important pluralisation in that sentence. Products. And none of them talk to each other, right?

Sometimes more is less.

Re:Social networks

[lennier]

I don't understand why they don't use e-mail lists (my preferred way), but then again I don't understand synchronous texting either.

Because managing email lists is a royal pain. You either have a private in-client group which you send to, in which case one person needs to be the mailing list manager, or you subscribe to an email list manager service, which are... not so easy to find nowadays - and then you need to remember your MLM password, etc, etc.

Or, you create a Facebook group which is public, automatically advertised to all your friends, they can join at their convenience, and management becomes a breeze.

The ease of use of Facebook is about 1000x over mailing lists, and it's guaranteed to be always up to date, and that's what catapults it from 'toy' into 'standard communication channel'.

The other thing is that the concept of'Third Place is also very important. Email is a private-to-private communication channel. Web is a public-broadcast medium. But Facebook is deliberately architected as a gigantic Third Place hitting the spot in between: semi-public, semi-private, and discoverable. The use of real names and the purposeful lack of privacy is a huge element in this: you don't need to know someone's handle, because this is a medium for finding people, and for having overhearable discussions, not for having private chats. The network itself automatically reaches out and brings people in with its reminders and prompts. This makes it a big 'front porch in the sky' which our online (and even offline) culture hasn't had yet, and that's why it took off.

Yes, please build an open replacement for this. Online third place is far too important to leave to a private provider. But understand what it is that Facebook is doing right.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Your name is not a word that one could reasonably expect a literate English speaker to have previously encountered; thus you propose a false dichotomy.
To substantiate the claim that 'diaspora' is a common enough word that one could reasonably expect a moderately educated English speaker to have previously encountered it, I provide the following:
In the British National Corpus word frequency list, 'diaspora' is tied with such words as 'delicious', 'circle', 'buddy', 'beautiful', 'bat', 'bottle', 'car', 'grape', and fittingly, 'words'.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

yawn.

Re:Social networks

[Daengbo]

Agreed. How is adding one more project helping? Sit down with the other projects and agree to follow the same specifications: XMPP for chat; OpenID and OAuth for identification, ActivityStrea.ms for status and posts; etc. They don't have to be exactly these, but whatever they are, at least all get on the same page. Oh, and allow federation between servers on different projects.

Re:Social networks

[techhead79]

Your seed stores other people's encrypted private data as well to ensure availability. When you accept a "friend" request, you transmit the public key directly to the other person's seed. (I assume over yet another encrypted link.) Your "friend" can then request your data from the DHT and then decrypt it.

I just don't understand why you think the replicated data needs to be encrypted yet again, let alone decrypted before being re-encrypted.

Ok if they are using GPG that says to me the standard two key system. Excuse me if I repeat the obvious here...but I just want to make sure we're on the same page. You use someone else's public key and your private key to encrypt something. That data is then only available to the two people that own the private keys. A 3rd party can not use the data. How do you expect other seeds to store the encrypted data? Two key system...

PersonAPrivateKey+PersonBPublicKey = DataSeg1AB(let's say the user's phone number?)

DataSeg1AB gets put onto seed 2 for replication. Now who on the network can even read DataSeg1AB? 1 person. It doesn't matter how much you duplicate the data unless you duplicate it for all users.

DataSeg1AC

DataSeg1AD

If you then have 1 shared private key for all users of your data...how secure is that? The entire point of GPG encryption was to keep the private key off the network and to never transmit it anywhere. The more you duplicate the private key the more chances there are for it to be captured by a malicious user or bot. In this sense there is no point in even using GPG encryption for this model. If I send someone my public key they can't do jack with data I send them because I don't have their public key. I need THEIR public key to encrypt data for them. And when I do encrypt the data for THEM the replication of this data is again mute as it has no advantage that simple cache for offline viewing that wouldn't solve.

These guys are going into this spouting off GPG encryption and a distributed model....the ONLY way that would work SECURELY is if you duplicated data for every user and distributed all of that data onto the network meaning the data storage would be huge for just one profile.

SO in your example...I accept a friend request and I(A) send Person B a public key. Assume I have Person B's public key in the request as well. I use Person B's public key to encrypt the data and I distribute that data to the other nodes...only person B can read that data even on the other nodes. In order for anyone else to ever read that same data they would then need to send in another key/friend request. A location with the original unencrypted data Person A's node or Person B's node (which can unencrypt the data on the network) would need to be contacted in order to encrypt the data for new person C. The data for person C would then need to be distributed again onto the network...which AGAIN is no better than simply giving person C a cache on their local system on say a USB drive?

My point is encryption is great and all...but the way they are describing it and the way they want to use it...it's not GPG/PGP. Either you follow GPG/PGP and have duplication of data on the network for every friend connection or you have a one key system...or you have a shared GPG private key being transmitted on the network (bad...horrible...pointless idea). If you think a single server is a horrible point of failure...imagine countless of your idiot computer using friends having on their hard drives a key that can decrypt all of your profile information. All of this doesn't even consider revoking the data from the network. My point is they can have GPG and massive amounts of data. Or they can call it what they plan on using it like just standard 1 key encryption distributed onto the network in which anyone anywhere can get their greedy little paws on it if even 1 node that has your private key is jacked. Think that's beyond the scope of what spammers can do?

Re:Social networks

[Jarik_Tentsu]

And these people who won't invite you to their "events" if they have to shoot you an email... You call them "friends"?

You're making it out like its a really bad thing, but it makes sense.

The issue isn't with close mates you talk to regularly or who will think of you immediately while organising an event. It'll be when someone you aren't so close with decides to say, go to the pub tonight and invites 50 friends on their facebook. He's not neccessarily going to remember that you don't have a facebook, he may not even realize he omitteed you at all. And even if he did, why would he go out of his way to call/sms you for something small and casual like a pub night? This of course assumes he even has your other contact details.

I used to boycott facebook until I realized I was missing out on these casual events. When I joined I didn't use it for anything other than to get invited to events, but I've been starting to realize how good facebook is to just stay in touch with people. Once again, not your close mates but people you don't see regularly.

It's certainly great for tracking down old school friends too.

Re:Social networks

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Hey buddy, how's it feel to be back up to posting all the way up at zero again!? You don't have negative karma anymore ... but you're not quite positive yet. Keep up the "Microsoft rocks, you all suck" message and maybe you'll make it!

Aw, c'mon. Be nice to Eldavo Jr, he's still in training. :D

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't need to "crack a damn dictionary", you should already know what diaspora means or how to spell it. Seriously, wtf is wrong with you?

Re:Social networks

[Risen888]

The thing they need most is a name that's not "diaspora" the streak of horribly named open source projects continued.

I think it beats "Facebook."

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

(that's bad)

Re:Social networks

[das_magpie]

Now, Facebook has tried hard to make that less true with features with tagging of images that build up their own database of historical information that is a bit harder to move over to another site.

But to support your argument it would not be that difficult to write an application to export your entire Facebook account details. If you were smart about it you could even keep the names and facebook ids of each user who has used the migration tool and as people shift across using the tool they would get there old lives back.

Re:Social networks

[LihTox]

If this is the case, who are these people and can they be trusted with the data any more than Facebook?

I'd say that, as long as there is competition and portability, youwill be able to trust them more: you will be able to choose the hosting provider you like regardless of what your friends and family are using, and you will be able to take all of your data and move to a different host if your first host threatens to cross the evil threshold. Furthermore, maybe they can operate at a smaller, more local scale than Facebook; heck, perhaps whole families or groups of friends could operate off of one household server.

Re:Social networks

[blackraven14250]

I'd rather trust my friend who lives down the block with my info, than deal with Facebook's servers located in (?) and operated by (?) number of strangers with (?) credentials and convictions.

Re:Social networks

[MisterSquid]

Yeah, you probably are the only one since "diaspora" has nothing to do with exile.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

One simple concept, gateway services. If somebody can develop a community-based, OSS and secure social network, then add in a common gateway interface to facebook and other social sites, that is both simple to set up and secure (ie: passes no personal data back along the pipe) then they could suck the life out of Farcebook... almost literally :-)

If they get any sort of momentum, and aren't too nerd focused in their design, I'll give them a fair go, probably even encourage people to join.

Re:Social networks

[dustrider]

Damn right! Diaspora has already pissed me off, 4 college kids getting their funding in 10 days when there's been open source projects slogging it out for years. I'll bet they'll be "learning" heavily from the OSS projects too. So how come these guys got the public eye? as far as I can tell it's cos they've got a nice name, and got featured on HackerNews. Until they release code they're got getting any support from me.

Re:Social networks

[dustrider]

Diaspora is not about standards. it is about decentralization though. But they want their product to be the one on all the servers.

If you want to look at open standards, look at the stuff around Buzz (not buzz itself) but things like activity streams, Salmon, pubsub. Most of those protocols have been about for ages but are only getting traction now.

The thing that really pisses me off is that instead of talking about protocols, we're talking about diaspora, loading them up with requests and expectations way before there's even a glimmer of a product.

Re:Social networks

[BasilBrush]

Whats a Google, Yahoo, Bing?

Well the second two are words which everyone is already familiar. And they are all 2 syllables, or one. Diaspora has neither of those advantages.

But more importantly than the objective disadvantages, it subjectively just sounds like an awful and pretentious name. It's very unlikely to catch on with the general public.

Re:Social networks

[BasilBrush]

The difference is that Diaspora is to be released under the aGPL license. Making it free software. Free as in both free speech and free beer probably.

Which says precisely nothing about if or how it will provide more privacy than Facebook.

The only thing is will do is attract Slashdot users, or at least that sub-section that don't despise the very idea of social networking. Which is fine if you want to network to a few other free-software enthusiasts, or arrange a star trek convention. But it'll be completely useless for keeping in touch with families, "normal" friends, and most women.

Re:Social networks

[Gulthek]

Less than four syllables.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh but you forget, I am THE arbiter of what will be popular in 18 months time and I closed my FaceBook and Twitter accounts last week.

The new FB is 'leave-me-the-Hell-alone-you-freak'.

Re:Social networks

[bhtooefr]

It's more that it's about standards in that it's setting up a standard.

You could cleanroom Diaspora and come up with something that could explicitly connect to Diaspora.

Or, it's aGPL, if that license is acceptable, fork it, and still connect to Diaspora networks.

Re:Social networks

[Deosyne]

"Hit me up on Diaspora!" "Leave a note on my Diaspora!"

Yeah, lead balloon inbound.

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

With a decentralised system, wouldn't that be done when the other servers that have copies of your data sync with your one? It will probably take longer for the deletion to propagate, compared to the likely instantaneous deletion you get with a centralised system, but shouldn't actually be any more work for the user. Besides the issue I have with Facebook, is not about being able to delete what I have already put on there, but rather the information Facebook forces me to share just to use it. I haven't yet signed up to Facebook due to privacy concerns, but from what I've read there is no way to block your "friends list" being available to your friends, and if it was just made available to my friends I could perhaps live with that, but it is also available to any Facebook apps your friends choose to use which can provide a significant amount of data useful for profiling to third parties, this is data I can't avoid giving to Facebook if I want to use it, yet they are not willing to let me keep it private.

Re:Social networks

[IntlHarvester]

Guess I'd remembered that backassward. And agreed that it was probably the relationship relational model that was really killing performance. Every successor social network has a much simpler 'friendship' graph than Friendster did.

While I admire their goals...

[pedantic bore]

... after the first few million users, it'll be awfully hard to resist the siren call of megalomania.

Re:While I admire their goals...

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be decentralized. If engineered correctly, they will be incapable of doing what Facebook has done.

Even if engineered poorly, they will be incapable of doing what Facebook has done (but the poor engineering will either cause it to fail or kill the privacy they're looking for.) The point is, no one will own it.

Re:While I admire their goals...

[beef3k]

RTFA - this is decentralized, there is no centralized hub which registers/keeps track of millions of users, hence no siren call to heed

Re:While I admire their goals...

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but if their software is released under the GPL, then they'll potentially have to compete with their own users should they do anything that upsets their userbase.

Once they start accepting code from the other developers and incorporate it in their system, THEY will be locked into GPL-compliance with those contributors, similar to the whole Nexuiz licensing scandal from a while back. If they accept any help from other contributors, they can't just take the code and run if they decide that their ideals are no longer worth focusing on.

You know all the groups on Facebook that form to "protest" a change in the Terms of Use? Imagine how much more effective they would be on a site where the source code is available for anyone else to use.

Re:While I admire their goals...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, geeks. As a former geek turned millionaire I gotta tell you what the problem is.
Basically, you start your project all open source, full of good ideas and nice feelings.
Then it begins to grow, makes money, and then you are introduced to bleached hair playboy ascending models and penthouse pornstars that cost thousand grand to sleep one night with you and rock your world, because they just want to sleep with the next billionaire and prove to the other bitches they are the most expensive pussy in earth.
So, then you need more and more money to keep paying for them and it becomes an addiction.
So, you sell your soul to the devil and that is how it ends, just like facebook...

Re:While I admire their goals...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but it's the AFFERO GPL, which means if anyone *USES* the system, the server operator is required by the license to provide them with a copy of the source code (which on the one hand seems *HORRIBLE* for security, but on the other seems nice for encouraging server ops not to be dicks)

Fundraise call is fundraise call

[Anonymous Coward]

These guys just want extra cash for the project, without giving out a clear view about how the platform will work or run?

A facebook-clone in 3-4 months? Very unlikely.

Re:Fundraise call is fundraise call

[gringer]

They already have the money they need to get this off the ground ($10,000). More pledged money is just icing on the cake.

Re:Fundraise call is fundraise call

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. They seem to focus on the code where it's really not the important stuff here.
How this things will work ?

Still, I really wish this project to succeed.

Could happen

[ZekoMal]

That is, essentially, how Facebook began. The only thing that is different is greed. As college students, they might want to protect privacy. As fresh out of college students, they might look at their massive college debt and start weighing their options. Before you know it, they're paying lip service to advertisers at the expense of their user base. But hey, at least they'll have Ruralville!

Re:Could happen

[ZeroExistenZ]

[...] and start weighing their options

Ofcourse, now they want money to support themselves so they can run the project.
Afterwards, if it works and would run (unlikely in that timeframe) they will want to make money out of it because "they put alot into it and need to maintain it".

Not soon after, they'll want to make a fulltime living out of it, and try to come up with a way to make it "free" for users, yet try to find creative ways to make money off of it, like advertizing.

After that, we get the same thing.

I'm more for the idea of decoupling data on these kindof site and make them transferable, sortof like RFC-protocol which sites can implement to talk to eachother. The "brand"-dependency would dissapear, and users will be able to use services based on relevance and enjoyment without needing to be "tied in".

Re:Could happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Their solution, called Diaspora, will be decentralized. You launch your own node. There will be no brand dependency.

Re:Could happen

[sznupi]

Or...Google finally has in their sights a young, cheap to buy social networking serive with bright future; for which they can ensure "not evil" state of affairs.

Re:Could happen

[ZekoMal]

Nah, Google will release their own social network called Friendoogle, which we'll all already be members on because of all of the data mining they do. Social networks are data mining tools; Google hardly needs that. They'd rather do it after the fact, as an after thought really, out of the goodness of their non-evil hearts.

Re:Could happen

[Lumpy]

It's called Orkut. google has had a Social site longer than facebook has existed.

it's wildly popular outside the usa.

Re:Could happen

[sznupi]

Facebook is wildly popular (also) outside the USA. Orkut...pretty much only in Brazil and India.

Re:Could happen

[icebraining]

Google already has two social networks. How many more do they need?

Re:Could happen

[Pawnn]

Google already has a social networking place called Orkut. They also have Google Profiles which lacks a lot of social networking functionality, but it has some of the same features...

Re:Could happen

[DragonWriter]

Google already has a social networking place called Orkut [orkut.com]. They also have Google Profiles which lacks a lot of social networking functionality, but it has some of the same features...

Google itself is a social network, with centralized login and large numbers of social apps -- both Google-generated and third-party -- status updates/microblogs (Buzz) with the ability to follow (and to access updates by other methods, including geographic search), full-blown blogs (Blogger), APIs for third-party apps, application hosting for third-party apps that can hook directly into the APIs (AppEngine), shared calendaring, messaging (instant and otherwise), shared documents (Google Docs), shared photo albums (Picasa), shared video (YouTube), and pretty much everything else a social network provides. And more user accounts than Facebook.

Its more subtle than Facebook, and less of a walled garden, so its a lot easier not to even notice it as a social network.

Re:Could happen

[Anonymous Coward]

"paying lip service" means saying but not doing; being insincere

The vast majority

[Adustust]

Pay no attention to the amount of data they let loose upon their facebook pages. Nor do they care, as long as they can access their online farms. They're already giving out their credit card numbers to buy fuel for their tractors.

Re:The vast majority

[Pojut]

This always kind of confused me. I could understand it if we were talking about older folks, but many people my age (mid 20's) and many people younger (i.e. people that never knew of a world without Internet) know about the privacy complications, yet still don't care, or post stuff on Facebook with reckless abandon.

I'm a frequent Facebook user (3-5 updates a day), but I never put anything on there I don't want the public to know. Like my parents taught me back in my IRC/ICQ/Yahoo Chat days: "If you don't want someone online to know something about you, just don't type it."

Re:The vast majority

[Daengbo]

Your dad is Eric Schmidt?!? You lucky bastard!

I've seen something like that recently...

[sznupi]

http://retromessenger.sourceforge.net/ - serverless IM (finds IP of friends via DHT; apparently also has "push message to all friends" functionality, close enough to some social services)
http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ - in the spirit of the above, but more of a "service" at this point - Chat & Filetransfer, searching friends, messages, Forums...encrypted, DHT
http://tstone.sourceforge.net/ - apparently strives to be a serverless VoIP cooperating with one of the above (generally they seem to be related to a large degree)

All appear roughly usable; I have to check them one time...if some buddies of mine will be willing to play at the same time. Oh, we get to the most important point - are the above actually in much use? Have you even heard about them? Yeah, exactly...

PS. If you have something against publishing some of your personal info on FB...just don't give it to them.

Re:I've seen something like that recently...

[buchner.johannes]

Retroshare looks really good, maturity and technology-wise. The issue is that no-one cares about these platforms, i.e. they do not gain traction. The reasons for that is in my opinion:

  (1) A new social network has to be significantly better than the existing one people are currently using. Otherwise people won't register there too.
      - E.g. it has a cool feature: a game, a new form of interaction or discussion, etc.
      - It is not enough to be a copy that does pretty much the same thing (or even less) with higher quality & security.
  (2) A new social network has to identify and grow from within the user group. Facebook and StudiVZ for example were built from students by students. A project can't come from outside, otherwise it will not target the right user minority (the early adopters).
      - A majority of users will join because they know someone in the network (someone socially important to them).
      - A small minority will join independently because they think the network is good.
  (3) After users are registered in both the old and the new network, the new network has to be consistently better in usability and quality. Bad press about security leaks and privacy (StudiVZ) hurts. This will make users switch completely to the new network (by using it predominantly) and ultimately remove the old networks account.

Just some ideas...

Re:I've seen something like that recently...

[Eponymous Coward]

PS. If you have something against publishing some of your personal info on FB...just don't give it to them.

That doesn't do much. If you have friends who post, just about everything is going to end up on there anyway.

Try this: sign up for Facebook with a new email account. Don't let them scrape your contacts. Add a few friends and wait. One day soon, you will log in and Facebook will show you a list of a bunch of email accounts and ask you which ones are yours. Most of them will be yours. It totally freaked me out.

I used to be worried about Google, but at this point, Facebook is far scarier.

Re:I've seen something like that recently...

[buchner.johannes]

ctd.

This is why distributed approaches like Diaspora/Retroshare/... will fail:

    - You have a problem publishing new versions of the software. You can't force new versions out, there will be incompatibilities between nodes, things will not 'just work'.
    - Privacy aside, you don't add value that Facebook hasn't.
    - Quality of the service: The development team or community will not provide a continuous, mature program version.
        * unless they have some business model on how to generate revenue from it.
    - No inspiration, or higher goal they strive to. They just do something existing a little bit better. But there is nothing fundamental about why one should use the new service. It is better in features, it is logical to use it. But that is not satisfactory.
    - Original developers will at some point stop maintaining the project, and not have gained enough other developers around them that continue development, maintenance and infrastructure on a high quality level.

Please, Diaspora* team, prove me wrong. Read this and prove me wrong.
If you can't, it is not the fault of your expertise, or skills as a programmer or software engineer. There is just more to it than developing a superior product.

Re:I've seen something like that recently...

[sznupi]

That data was essentially public already...

Re:I've seen something like that recently...

[Eponymous Coward]

What data are you talking about? Email addresses? Or the party photos your friend posted that have identified you with a helpful tag?

Or are you talking about the data they collect if you happen to forget to log out of Facebook and surf around to sites displaying the Facebook Connect button? IMHO, that's one of the most sinister ways that Facebook collects data. I suppose technically you are still volunteering the data because you didn't log out. After all, if you didn't want them to know about other sites you visit, you would have logged out, right?

Re:I've seen something like that recently...

[johnny6vasquez]

Think game client and server model. The OSS game The Mana World lets you play with older clients. Some of the newer functionality in the latest clients will be unavailable to those using older or forked clients, but the communication protocol still allows game play. I don't think it would be as big a deal unless there was a major change in the messaging format.

You give them POWER!

[UncHellMatt]

Well I mean first of all, having a link at the bottom of a /. article allowing users to post to their FB and Twitter accounts (emphasis on "twit" deliberate...) is certainly not going to assist the 600lb gorilla in losing market share, even if that gorilla is serving up all your personal information and pictures and all personal information and pictures of all your friends. At this point, you could have that gorilla holding up a neon sign saying "I SERVE UP YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION" acompanied by a mariachi band singing "We Expose Your Private Information CHA CHA CHA!" and still most lusers would gleefully keep using the site.

If, and I do mean if Facebook were to lose market share, it would take a stroke of pure luck. Good luck OR bad luck, as they are deeply entrenched.

IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[Mekkah]

IF they get reasonably big, FB will just NOMNOM them.

Re:IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[juanjux]

Read a little about the project. It's a network of distributed servers, much like email is. If everything works as designed and Facebook NOMNOM them, there will be 0 consequences for the network.

Re:IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[iamhassi]

Good point. If we donate our 10 or 30 or 50 grand, what's to stop facebook from coming in and saying "here's 10 million for your site".

Re:IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[Mekkah]

hahah... wouldn't even have to pay them. Those kids would shit their pants for jobs at FB.

Re:IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing stopping facebook from buying them out. But, if we can fragement the social graph enough with some other options, they might just have to adopt some open standards for interoperability...

It doesn't matter if facebook is privacy nightmare and the vast majority don't care, as long as those who do can use something else and still interact with them.

Re:IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[Anonymous Coward]

The community. FB could buy them out, but there will still (hopefully) be a community behind it that will continue to develop.

Re:IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably this bit:
Our Promise.
We promise to you that Diaspora will be aGPL software which will released at the end of the summer.

Re:IF they get big, FB will NOMNOM them

[PHPfanboy]

And those servers sit magically in the cloud where they will run for free

It's mostly the over 35 crowd...

[wiredog]

Who are getting pissed over privacy. I'm just unhappy (as a 45 year old) that I have to check my privacy settings weekly, and sometimes daily.

Re:It's mostly the over 35 crowd...

[AnonymousClown]

Just curious - are you staying with Facebook for business reasons (some use it for advertising, a LinkedIN type of thing) or do you have friends scattered all over the place? Obviously something is keeping you from closing out your account.

hold on a second

[mininab]

So the Salz-guy's plan is sweeter then the Zucker-guy's one. Am I the only one fearing a bad german joke ?

A better Facebook is already here: isolatr

[Anonymous Coward]

A better Facebook has already been around for years: isolatr (beta). You don't even have to create an account.

Looks familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

These four nerds actually strangely resemblance to the cast of the Big Bang theory.

Not Another Fucking Geek Project Name

[Anonymous Coward]

diaspora /d-as-p(-)r, d-/
origin: Greek

Cool name with potential to attract people: FAIL

Dirty Unix Joke

[Kozz]

Saw this article this morning. Don't overlook the "dirty Unix joke" on the blackboard. ;)

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[L4t3r4lu5]

There are no words to describe how amazingly awesome that is.

I don't think they even want the project to go ahead; They just wanted to get the NYT to post Unix sex.

Made. Of. WIN.

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[MathiasRav]

But... you can't fsck when the drive is mounted! That's all wrong!

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

way cool

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised there are people on /. who never heard of this joke before.

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[L4t3r4lu5]

It's not the joke... The joke is rubbish.

The fact that the NYT have it on their website is awesome, like the trolling of Oprah by 4chan "Over 9000 penises" etc. Funny as hell to rip on the luddites, essentially.

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[that IT girl]

Although, as a female ./er, I'd like to point out that "finger" seems to be missing. Unless it's before "touch" and therefore out of sight, but that seems out of order. ;)

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

And they've got a Russian too!

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

But, but, but... you're supposed to umount before fsck, not after!

*splutter* *choke*

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Although, as a female ./er, I'd like to point out that "finger" seems to be missing. Unless it's before "touch" and therefore out of sight, but that seems out of order. ;) [citation needed]

An instructional video would be appreciated, too.

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[kLaNk]

Did the NYT edit the photo? I don't see it there anymore (I remember seeing it earlier this morning though).

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is it on the board? I don't see it.

Posting anonymously out of embarrassment.

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[fbartho]

Nono, see you missed the fact that they stripped the parameters from those calls. You're actually fsck-ing a different device.

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[MathiasRav]

They photoshopped it away, the original is at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about_CA0/12about_CA0-articleLarge.jpg (mirrored at http://f.lolwh.at/eggy/12about_CA0-articleLarge.jpg in case they remove it).

Re:Dirty Unix Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's hilarious, thanks for the link. I wonder who over at NYT figured it out?

X has been doing it for years!

[DeanLearner]

First everyone hosted their own site themselves (I believe this was the case? I didn't really do that part)
Then everyone had sites hosted elsewhere (geocities)
Then everyone had a page on a single site (facebook)
Soon everyone will have their own facebook (diaspora)
And then everyone will have their own... everything on their own server... kinda like Unite by... Opera! Always two steps ahead

Right

[Chrisq]

They hit slashdot. They will become major in a few days. Don't worry. This one will actually succede!

Right, because everyone knows that Slashdot posters are social dynamos, followed by hundreds of fans who will willingly follow them onto the new network.

Re:Right

[sopssa]

John Carmack posts here. I think he might actually get a lot of slashdotters and other people to follow him, even if he only created a social network for developers or gamers.

Re:Right

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but after selling out id, I'd have to say John Carmack is the new Myspace of game developers :D

Honestly when did Doom 3 come out? What do you think the odds are of an open source engine release now? (What do you think the odds are of finding a jewel case release of Doom 3 in stores, compare to the 3-6 Q3A re-releases made since '00?)

Re:Right

[b4dc0d3r]

I put a link to the article on my FB page. Of course, no one ever replies to my posts, I think they filtered me out a long time ago. If everyone on slashdot with a facebook account did it, we'd reach - *does mental math* 20 people? Maybe 30. But at least we'd be trying.

Cows

[defore]

If everyone leaves Facebook, who will feed my cows?

Beaten to the punch

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn, been involved in an currently-internal commercially ran project with very similar goals (to be open sourced if it's ever finished) for the last year but constant schedule slip ups keep dragging it out further and further . I knew that someone would eventually start trying to do the same thing proactively by the time we hit our stride in Implementation.

Anonymous and vague due to standard employment NDA but we have a staff of ~30 if that gives it any context.

Re:Beaten to the punch

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Darn, been involved in an currently-internal commercially ran project with very similar goals (to be open sourced if it's ever finished) for the last year but constant schedule slip ups keep dragging it out further and further . I knew that someone would eventually start trying to do the same thing proactively by the time we hit our stride in Implementation.

Anonymous and vague due to standard employment NDA but we have a staff of ~30 if that gives it any context.

The thing with open source is that it either is or it isn't. If it's "going to be" then it's not yet and no guarantees that it every will be; nor are their guarantees that what is shared will be the same as what's worked on internally.

Because Diaspora *is* open source, it already has a better chance of success than an identical project that *will be* open source. The reason is slashdot and similar publicity - for every thousand geeks that disparages the idea, there's probably one saying .. "Hmm, you know... not bad. Maybe I can help." (Heck - I've already gotten two people to help with BBSSH, and I'm not even advertising for the help - just people who see the project, like it, and want to improve it.) In spite of what shortcomings OSS has, the ability to get a project up and running is *not* one of them -- assuming that enough people think the core idea is a good one.

Re:You Underestimate Your Mom

[Chrisq]

You'd be surprised at how easy it is for your mom to "log in".

I don't know about that...your mom expressed difficulty in getting my log in.

"I hope it doesn't load too fast!" "Don't worry, baby."

Don't worry, I've given her a magnifying glass. She should have better luck next time.

What about quality ?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm totally for a decentralized social network, I would not give them my money until we can have more concrete information about the quality of their work.

I'm not sure that the code here is the most important. The protocol is more important.At least, it must have a simple core system and be easily expandable.
And certainly other proprieties..

Interoperable

[Demonantis]

They have dis invested themselves by making it open source. Futher, if they ensure an interface between anyone hosting a piece of the social network instead of relying on it being a single site then no single operator has absolute control. If someone starts abusing what the public give them then they can move to a better operator. That is the problem with facebook. I admit it would be tricky to implement and the security would be more complex. But then at least then it would be a step forward instead of a copy of every other social networking site.

Here's a tip.. don't make it creepy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have an fb account. A couple of friends have invited me.. whatever.

Then this morning I get another invite, from someone I don't know. But at the bottom of the email it lists "people you may know on facebook".. and I did know all of them.

But how did it know that? The people that I knew were from different areas of my life, from different parts of the country, some I grew up with, some not.. and one person I know only from the internet. What data source is it looking at to know that I know these people? Fucking creepy!

Re:Here's a tip.. don't make it creepy.

[Nicodemus]

My guess is that your actual "friends" or at least the people that know you are importing their address books into facebook, which includes your email address. Facebook then emails everyone on those lists that doesn't have an account. At least that's my best guess after I got one of those creepy emails from facebook exactly as you describe.

Nicodemus

Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" responses

[Rogerborg]

Please apply 5 seconds' thought before getting all distributed up in my hizzizzy.

For this service to be popular, Real People will have to use it, not just you, me and him over there.

For Real People to use it, it will need to Just Work, First Time.

To Just Work, First Time, it needs to rely on having a reliable server/seeder/aggregator/gateway present 100% of the time. Let's call it a metaserver, although it's just semantics. There needs to be one place where every peer goes to find out where other peers are.

Who's going to run that default metaserver? Well, duh. The authors will run it.

When - not if, when - they go Dark Side and release a client that injects ads or collates data, who's going to switch to a fork clients and a different metaserver and protocol version? That's right: you, and me, and him over there. Not Real People.

If this takes off, then 99% of users will treat it exactly as they do Facebook, as a service that can (and will, eventually) do pretty much what it wants to them. Its success is predicated on being used by Real People, not you, me and him over there.

You may now commence your explanations of why this time, it will be different, and Real People will care about the things that you, me and him over there care about. I apologise for the interruption.

Since Facebook gives all the info out ...

[mordred99]

All they have to do is obtain the info from facebook and then people can manage their settings on this new site, and it is done .. :)

Re:You Underestimate Your Mom

[Pojut]

pfft. She would need a portable electron microscope. lol, you thought a magnifying glass would be eno-

Oh wait. You were talking about me.

People should be more afraid

[Ukab the Great]

About what happens if Google ever goes under and their gmail messages are sold to corporations who want to mine them for compromising information.

The key is in the protocol.

[Rhaban]

The main "selling point" of this project can not be its opensourceness in itself, because very few people really care about that.
This project must have something more than facebook, some functionnalities never seen before. And those are realy difficult to come up with.

The idea of a decentralized service, where anybody can set up his own server, is actually a really good ground on which new ideas can germ.

The goal should not only be to create a networked facebook, but to create a network of socialnetworkin sites where each site may have its own purpose and functionnalities, that allowed communication between sites without requiring an user to have an account with more than one of those sites.

let's say my primary interest is music. I can join a social neworking site caller musicnetworking.com, where I can upload some music I made, share playlists, or whatever one could do on a music social nework site. Let's say my friend is a world of warcraft addict, I can do a cross-site friend request using his identifier ("johnthenightelf@wowsocialneworkingsite.net"), and see on the homepage of my music site what he shares on his wow site.

If each node of this network can have its own purpose, and appeal to a specific subset of social network users without cutting them from their friends whose interests may not be exactly the same, the network can globally be appealing for a very large population, and then it may become a major player.

But this will need a very well thought protocol, because communication between the nodes is all this concept is about.

Re:The key is in the protocol.

[Mrdzone]

Like Reddit?

Re:The key is in the protocol.

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet

Re:The key is in the protocol.

[Rhaban]

Almost, except for the the fact that not at all.

The Oatmeal says

[Lordrashmi]

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/websites_stop

Pretty much covers it.

Long names - bad marketing...

[denzacar]

Cause, who wouldn't want to join a "A Road Rapists" social network, right?

P2P Social?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, essentially Freenet without all the dodgy shit?

If they can secure it and optimize bandwidth better than that and others like Opera Unite, then they deserve good things.
But so far, Opera Unite is slow and Freenet is slow on most pages simply due to most connections having awful upstream.

And they will have to have some sort of system to prevent abuse.
Maybe even have default whitelisted pages, such as profile information, pictures, the usual stuff.
But then we will have the defaulted blacklist pages, user created pages and such.
You could warn the user that they are browsing pages that could be unsafe, maybe even have a breakdown of some of the things the page can do to the "browser". (popups, generate HTML, evaluate dynamic content, etc)

It is a nice idea and i would love to see it work.
It was a similar idea i suggested to Opera to improve on Unite.
Opera Unite + P2P distribution would allow for near always up time for some sections of the profiles.
Media being hosted in the clouds would be entirely up to them. But considering how it usually kills services like this in terms of bandwidth, best not.
Plus, copyrighted stuff would end up getting 3rd parties screwed over for "distribution".

How to log in

[Bifurcati]

I just love the irony that to support them you have the option of loging in via your Facebook details ;)

It's a darn tough sell, but I threw them $5 - why not? If it comes together, it would be a fantastic Wikipedia-esque next-step of social networking. On the other hand, if Buzz can't do it...

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[Rhaban]

For this service to be popular, Real People will have to use it, not just you, me and him over there.

Yes.

For Real People to use it, it will need to Just Work, First Time.

Yes.

To Just Work, First Time, it needs to rely on having a reliable server/seeder/aggregator/gateway present 100% of the time. Let's call it a metaserver, although it's just semantics. There needs to be one place where every peer goes to find out where other peers are.

No.

The key is to make it work like e-mail: if you want to add a friend, you use his personnal identifier and the server he is registered on.

Anybody can set up an e-mail server, and it will instantly work and anybody will be able to send e-mail to users registered there. This project must work the same way.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[oodaloop]

Not everyone sells out. Look at craigslist. Just sayin.

"it will be harder to convince your mom to log in"

[SlappyBastard]

That's a bad thing?

This Easter I was BSing with the various family members after dinner. And my sister started getting on my teenage niece's case about some boy on her Facebook page and the teen-related shenanigans mentioned. Minor shit -- a kiss.

I finally looked at my sister and asked her if she recalled being that age. I recall my sister at that age, and let's just say our mom would have been elated if she could have kept her activities down to raunchy (as opposed to nasty).

Teens need liberated from Facebook. No one needs their goddamned parents breathing down their neck just because last night their boyfriend was breathing down their neck.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[cabjf]

Even if it works like email, the system would just end up with a small group of gatekeepers instead of just one. Sure you could set up your own, but how many people run their own server, locally or hosted? The distributed part of this is nice, in theory. I think a better way to go at it would be a foundation run project. Take away the desire to make as much money as possible, and put the focus on delivering the best product possible.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[dunezone]

Just Work, First Time.

Cuil

Whilst I support this initiative

[Anonymous Coward]

Any successor to facebook must be not for profit too!

gnu social and friends

[dns_server]

There are quite a few projects to create this:

http://www.elgg.org/ though it is not distributed (they are working on it)

http://onesocialweb.org/ is xmpp based, i have set up my own instance.

http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social has just started and is a gnu project.

There are some standards to help this kind of thing but most are not complete.
you may want to look into foaf for storing a social graph for example.

Please chat with other people if you find this interesting.
IRC chat: #social on freenode

Re:gnu social and friends

[zcopley]

Please don't leave out StatusNet. http://status.net/ and OStatus http://ostatus.org/ IRC: #statusnet on freenode It's an AGPL social networking platform, complete with a federated message bus built on Open Web standards that anyone can install and run on his/her own server or commodity hosting setup. No, it's not a 100% perfect replacement for Facebook as it stands (although a pretty good replacement for Twitter). But it could be. Why not build on the two years of work that's gone into it, instead of starting over from scratch, or trying to bolt on federation to a piece of software that was never designed to be distributed. The constant reinventing of the wheel is frustrating.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[Rhaban]

That would be the best way to gather a lot of people discussing how the product should be, and never actually deliver anything.

But this isn't a Facebook clone it's BETTER

[WebCowboy]

Interestingly creating a network like this means you have convince everyone to forget about Facebook and move to this platform.

Thing is this isn't equivalent to Facebook; it isn't a replacement-in-kind. Diaspora (sorry--Diaspora* whatever the asterisk means) seems to aspire to be a BETTER ALTERNATIVE. It is far to early to know how things will turn out as there is no complete and public implmenetation of their concept yet, however in my mind it is promising that there are motivated developers and financial backers who actually *GET* how the internet is supposed to work. See, so few people "get it" (and I fear that many powerful, smart people actually DO "get it" but are trying to STOP it because they crave power and money *cough*zuckerburg*cough*).

The Internet is dangerously close to being reduced to a mere digital version of the telephone system--the mere transport infrastructure for a small number of very large, segregated, proprietary, centralised "service providers". We broke open the medieval/feudal system of AOL/compuserve/prodigy/MSN/etc-over-dialup with the rise if the WWW. Internet-based innovation has the potential to free us even more from silos, information-pushing, walled gardens and such but clever people keep building more of them and the masses clamour to buy in, so now we have Facebook and Twitter and Apple and Google and they all have their own kingdoms and can only taks to each other in tightly controlled ways that serve the masters best interests and feed data through their own servers to be taken and used as they please.

The goal of Diaspora* does not appear to be to establish a "diaspora.com" internet presence that is intended to grow into another one of these fiefdoms. They don't even begin to have such asperations. The goal is to create a truly open social networking application server--think "Diaspora* is to Facebook what StatusNet is to Twitter". The features of such a system may be comparable to what Facebook offers but the architecture is specifically designed to ALLOW interaction, federation between hosts. They want to kill facebook with not another one big facebook, but with dozens, hundreds, thousands of "mini facebooks", hosted by everyone from geeks' personal servers in ther basements to ISPs and hosting companies to corporate web servers. These people's servers couldn't ever grow tot he size of the actual facebook (some might only host the profiles of a geek's family, or even just one person), but they wouldn't have to becasue it doesn't matter--you could find old firends, add them to your friend's list, see their status, subscribe to their feeds, whatever...without giving the server or hosting company a second thought. It'd be like email--we don't worry if we can send do email addresses on different domains or servers or ISPs after all.

If it was done right why would it be so hard to convince people to abandon Facebook? If you are Joe Schmoe typical internet user and your ISP had its own Diaspora* where all customers were automatically members that was the default homepage and you could just log in, check your email, find that old buddy from high school who is on a different Diaspora* server, see your sister's "tweets", look at the picture your cousin posted of his trip to Barcelona...why bother with Facebook? It would seem so....limited.

This is the same as when internet service became commercially available. People--even very smart and "visionary" people like Bill Gates--argued exactly what you did--essentially "you have to convince everyone to forget about AOL, Compuserve Progidy, etc and move to the internet". The internet was geeky and academic, user hostile and a difficult place to find information if you didn't know where to look (this was when Gopher was the height of user friendliness, the WWW was just becoming graphical, most Windows versions had no TCP/IP stack built in, searching meant using Archie and Veronica and there was no index of the WWW yet...). Right up to Windows 95 was release

Re:But this isn't a Facebook clone it's BETTER

[jra]

And, unfortunately, I don't think it's going to work.

Quite apart from the Metcalfe's Law aspect, and the "your social data is already in Facebook, and it's a bitch to get it back out" part, there are fundamental technical reasons why it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to set up something like Diaspora-silly-asterisk wants to.

The two most prominent are:

Searching -- ever search for something on Gnutellanet, vice, say, the original Napster? Nuff said?

Second, and much more important, there are some things that Facebook can do *because it's a trusted (heh) third-party intermediary*, which an environment like Diaspora posits, you couldn't do... because in a client-server environment: *you can't trust the client*.

Since you can't trust the client, those functions simply cannot be provided by a distributed servent network with no central providers at all.

The most prominent example is probably that when someone asks to become your friend, you can see *who Facebook says* their other friends are, and the user can't forge that cause they don't have control over it.

In the Diaspora model, you either have to take their word for what their client sends you, which could be made up whole cloth, or query the entire network "who is a friend of X", and--as Blake Shelton says of Ol' Red--wait.

Some of these problems may be soluble by clever implementation of crypto authentication, but some of them seem to me to be fundamental design blocks.

Freenet 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

This just sounds like freenet (http://freenetproject.org/) all over.....

Freedom in the Cloud

[Statecraftsman]

To me, software freedom is being able to choose and customize the software I use without limit. With applications like Facebook, I cannot of course do any more customizing than the Facebook allows me to. The FSF tried to address this problem with the AGPL and many web applications have rightfully chosen it as a way to give users freedom online. Unfortunately there's a rather big part of the equation that the AGPL and the four traditional freedoms miss. It's that our data is often stuck inside even AGPLd applications. If we want to have true freedom online we need The Freedom to Migrate and it seems Diaspora is trying to provide.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Who is everyone?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Because first you did indeed host your own site, but YOU were a university or other large institution as they were the only ones to have access to the net.

If you mean the unwashed masses with everyone then the first hosting was the home page, provided by your ISP.

Geocities and the like came after that, when ISP's turned more towards low-cost and provided to little flexibility or capacity.

Next up was the blog, the home-page re-invented.

Myspace took a look in.

I think that with ip6 we might actually indeed get something like Opera's unite instead. I already use the same Opera thanks to its sync feature, why not host my profile from my web browser as well and people connecting to my own router which has its own IP and can be reached by anyone? The next facebook would possibly not host the content, but index it instead. It would allow far more freedom as to how you publish information, but also make it less standarized.

Basically, since you list is far longer, it seems we get something new, or something old in a new coat, every couple of years. So presumably the perfect method has not yet been found.

How is this different than Drupal?

[cwgmpls]

Drupal has been providing open-source community plumbing for years.

Re:How is this different than Drupal?

[jittles]

wow! You can keep your open source plumbing! I don't want to have a look at the source of anything you'll find in there!

Re:How is this different than Drupal?

[cwgmpls]

Then use Atrium or Acquia. Both provide turn-key social sites built on Drupal.

The point is, these guys are going to be spending 90% of their time writing behind-the-scenes functionality to make everything work, and 10% making it look good and easy to use. Drupal already provides the first 90%. If they really believe in open source, they could be contributing to work already done and making it better -- and end up with a better product than they could do on their own.

Sure, these guys are young and have time to waste. More power to them. But when their pet project is gone and forgotten, Drupal and projects built on Drupal will still be around. That is the whole point of open source

Re:How is this different than Drupal?

[lennier]

Because Drupal is something you run on one website, and zillions of individual websites with hand-crafted Drupal installs does not make a Facebook killer.

Conceivably one could build a distributed social network on Drupal, in the same way you could build it on PHP, but Drupal itself is still stuck in the 'one web server, one database, a bunch of pages/resources and lots of web clients viewing it' mould.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[juanjux]

When - not if, when - they go Dark Side and release a client that injects ads or collates data, who's going to switch to a fork clients and a different metaserver and protocol version? That's right: you, and me, and him over there. Not Real People.

It's open source; you switch to another client just like there isn't a single Jabber client.

Real names.

[Anonymous Coward]

What made Facebook big and new was that it didn't use Internet nick names, but real names. Then everyone could find everyone instantly.

MySpace was never (not in my region anyway) a place to connect with existing irl friends, but a place to find new "Internet friends".

In this perspective, Facebook is a first. At least a first big one.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[Anonymous Coward]

You did not type all that in 5 seconds.

Friends and family all over the country

[wiredog]

Most of the people I've "friended" are in other States. I never "friend" someone I see more than once a week, because I connect IRL. But I've got friends I've known since 1970 that I keep in touch with on FB. And FB was wonderful when a friend got deployed to Iraq.

I hope they get it going.

[heavensbest]

I went to facebook yesterday and just wish there was something that was simple. It is like facebook is 'gossip'-book. I don't care what some one I know said to someone else I don't know. They have inspired me and I'm going to go to kickstart to try to get my ideas going.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be a pessimist, but why do I get the feeling that they have no idea what they're doing? Oh, it's the fact that they have yet to prove that they know what they're doing. How many undergrads have ambitions like these after doing something for a class project? Lots of them. You've all seen it. How often does it develop into anything? Almost never. Let me know when they've released something scalable (hundreds of millions of users). Being decentralized may help scalability, but it doesn't necessarily mean it'll scale to millions (or hundreds of millions) of users.

Oblig Futurama

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine, I'll go and build my own social networking site.... with blackjack!..... and hookers!..... infact...... screw the social networking site.

Getting Your Mom To Join

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to make it popular just make sure you give it a name that will scream "safe and serious application" like "WackNet" or "Boogy Blog".

people power

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the nice thing about the digital world though. It doesn't really cost your friends anything to join a new site. I'd finally convinced, 2 months ago, my 70yo Dad to join facebook, and he enjoyed it. They changed the rules and I'll be moving him and everyone else to an alternative as soon as I find a good one. I've already 'de-paged' myself, Dad, and some friends who asked for help. Facebook will either allow people the level of privacy and sharing THE PEOPLE want, or die the slow Myspace death.

Google figured this out ages ago. Give THE PEOPLE what they want, and then figure out how to profit from giving it to them. Don't try to force them to use services that do not meet their needs. It DOES NOT WORK.

...and distributed.

[DrYak]

The difference is that Diaspora is to be released under the aGPL license. Making it free software

...and its whole architecture is distributed (as is the case of other opens-source social networks systems cited elsewhere).
Just like Jabber, and other nice standard which emerged from opensource projects.

Thus you could run one instance ("seed" in Diaspora parlance) on your own server.
Or if you don't have the knowledge and/or resources to do it, create a profile on some Dispora-provider.
As it's distributed and open, it will still let you communicate with other users from other seeds running elsewhere on the web.

If the provider goes "Zuckerberg" on its privacy ? Just move to another seeds and continue from there. As the system is open and distributed all seeds can communicate.
Whereas, with Facebook, well, if you don't like the privacy and decide to move to Buzz, well good luck. You can't bring all your friends with you, unless you encourage everyone to switch along with you.

With any luck, if such a distributed system becomes popular enough, the current big players might get forced to interoperate with the main system (be it OneSocialWeb, Dispora, or whatever else). Just like what's hapenning with Jabber and GoogleTalk versus FaceBook and StudiVZ, who are slowly moving to XMPP/Jabber for their chat systems.

Although the current situation is subpar :
- Facebook is using a non-encrypted XMPP/Jabber interface which lacks compared to (for example) Pidgin's Plugin (the list-to-group mapping is really bad).
- and StudiVZ has outsourced part chat capabilities to Nimbuzz (namely to make a newer web-app and mobile support) which in turn operates as a Jabber gateway (a rather circumvented way to support it).

But still its a move in the right direction. So if they feel threatened enough by newer "Social" standard, they might follow again.

Re:"it will be harder to convince your mom to log

[drooling-dog]

Teens need liberated from Facebook. No one needs their goddamned parents breathing down their neck just because last night their boyfriend was breathing down their neck.

I'd wager that the current crop of kids is the most supervised and tightly controlled of any generation, ever. The 50s were as oppressive as hell (and hence the rebellion of the 60s), but even then you could evade the scrutiny of parents, teachers, and "friends" at least a good part of the time. Will we wake up one morning only to realize that what felt like liberation was something else entirely?

retarded

[z-j-y]

CmdrTaco, are you retarded?

Some college dudes *talk* about building a software sometime in future, without any details, and that becomes huge news? The world is already SATURATED with softwares like that.

Re:"it will be harder to convince your mom to log

[SlappyBastard]

What's unreal to me is how many kids refuse to unfriend their parents. I understand no one wants to hear shit for unfriending mom, but maybe mom needs to realize her job is to help the kid grow up. And in many cases, growing up means mom not being there.

Great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm totally making a facebook fan page for this so all my friends will know about it!

Wait...

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[Anonymous Coward]

But a small group of gatekeepers is already a huge step forward. Right now social networking is all about building silos with everyone locked inside. I hesitate to use the word "monopoly", since you can obviously go to a different social networking site, but certainly there is a form of lock-in. But if we had a social networking system that was distributed, and email-like, then different servers/providers would have to compete with each other to host user data. If done properly, then each user somehow "owns" their identifier and can migrate it to another server/hoster without anyone else noticing, similar to how one can own a domain name and outsource the actual DNS and web-server process to someone else. In this scenario, the various hosts/server/gatekeepers have to compete with each other to be the ones hosting users. Ones with bad privacy policies will, presumably, lose customers. An additional benefit is that by having the network split between different providers, there isn't a single company that has unrestricted access to data-mining the whole social graph. This separation of data limits how much damage an individual host can do by being unscrupulous.

If the format were well-designed and truly open, then it would also be trivial to migrate all your data (friends list, photos, tags, etc.) to another provider.

There are obviously lots of things to be worked-out here. How will these gatekeepers make money? Most people won't want to pay a fee, so there will have to be mechanisms for ad injections. How do we prevent some gatekeepers (especially those that become quite popular) from breaking the standard and creating a non-compliant bubble that includes lock-in or privacy violations?

I fully admit that there is lots of complexity to such an idea, and that implementing it properly will be quite difficult. It may very well turn out that a small number of gatekeepers end up dominating... but again, that's better than what we have now. At a minimum, I think it's worth analyzing and working towards. I don't think we should give up on the idea of decentralized, standards-compliant social networking just yet.

Disappointing article lacking substance...

[herojig]

Disappointing article lacking substance. I was hoping for news on a better facebook. Instead, distributed vaporware in the NYT? I like FB, and so do all my family and friends. My dog even has a page, with over 200 of his own friends. But personally I just use it as one big twitter site, without having to tweet (share on FB). Having an FB userid/pw also speeds up creating accounts on many more sites these days (my big use #2). What would be better is some integration with Gmail accounts, so there was some real email client to use, instead of the limited message threads currently on FB. In fact, if Google and FB just merged, that would be alright by me:)

...and more

[Anonymous Coward]

Also OpenSocial and SocialSite

Hmmmmmm........

[ZosX]

Diaspora sounds like.....

Diarrhea?

Re:Hmmmmmm........

[Sporkinum]

Sounds kinda funny, but it's really brown and runny.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[xlotlu]

The "metaserver" can be just a tracker. And if you're scared of a central server needed for authentication, look no further than kerberos.

Bandwidth isn't free.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I'd like to know how these kids are going to pay for bandwidth at even a fraction of Facebook. Hell - how Facebook comes up with the money is a mystery itself.

Your Momma

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Mom is already logged in. :)

Let me just put this here

[xam0x]

Here let me save you guys an assload of time: http://www.tornadoweb.org/ It's the framework for friend feed that facebook open sourced after they bought them out. Just because you build it doesn't mean they will come.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[Chardish]

The difference, of course, being that when the original authors (or the maintainers of the original metaserver) go to the dark side, it's not hard for a nonprofit benevolent geek to open up her own server, and allow users to migrate their data over to the new server and remain on the same network, keeping all their connections intact. At that point you're basically moving your website (your social network "node") to a new host (another Diaspora server), while remaining on the same network!

Right now, if you're fed up with how Facebook is handling your data, you have to quit Facebook. With Diaspora, if you're fed up with how your Diaspora server is handling your data, you switch servers, or even start your own.

Furthermore, the whole thing is going to be free software, so in the event of the original authors trying to slip nasty stuff into the code, a) we can know about it and b) it won't be hard to fork the project into a compatible non-evil project.

This is radically different from Facebook's philosophy of "we own all your data and you're stuck with us." My only hope is that the Diaspora guys can make their stuff easy to use.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[linuxpyro]

When - not if, when - they go Dark Side and release a client that injects ads or collates data, who's going to switch to a fork clients and a different metaserver and protocol version? That's right: you, and me, and him over there. Not Real People.

Well, 'Real People' aren't going to be interested in the little things. Just like they don't like to think about things like updating the Linux kernel. And yet, I know many (relatively) non-technical people who do fine with Ubuntu. The founders of this project may very well go to the dark side, but as long as there's a dark side there will be a light one, too. People are free to fork the code, and if these four start trying to pull a FaceBook someone else can pick up the slack much more easily.

i might be able to do something about it

[Anonymous Coward]

and last time i did back in 99 i had 8 million uniques which is a massive amount

ill let you know what i do , as i am now in contact with the lads

Privacy Models vs. Flexibility in Social networks

[billstewart]

The real trick here is how they build the communications and privacy models - how much data is open, how do they share it, what can you do with it - and how that affects what kinds of features you can build using it. You could build something like Livejournal on a pretty tight system with no central data storage, but it'd be harder to find your ex-girlfriend's cousin's third-grade-teacher's dog's picture and send it a cute icon of a fire hydrant. Or if you build a system that's really good at both of those, then you'll have tradeoffs in how much data you have to ship around, so your DSL connection is 98% full of encrypted packets for your friends' friends' friends' searches, and your query gets you a dialog box about "your posting may cost the net hundreds or thousands of dollars."

And that flexibility is important, not only for the kinds of marketing people who want to monetize everything, but also for the people who want to maintain the community and keep all of those users around and interested, as opposed to having them disappear like Friendster or Orkut users who had their fifteen minutes of fame and six months of friend invitations from cute guys in Brazil. Livejournal seems to be doing ok with it, but Facebook gets a lot of social involvement out of all of that Farmville and Mafia Wars stuff, and the question becomes how to facilitate the social networking effects of it without also the mass information-leakage.

Who sent me to Facebook? My siblings, mostly

[billstewart]

I think my sister probably got dragged into it by her kids, but she dragged my other sister into it, and then my brother, then me, and apparently several of my cousins are also there. So if she puts up new pictures of what her kid's doing, Facebook sends mail to my spambox email account, which I now have to check more often because that's where friend requests from my real-life friends show up, along with the "happy birthday" notes from people who think the Jan 1 1900 I gave FB is my real birthday. At least it doesn't get most of the messages about friends sending icons with cute little farm toys or new black helicopters for their MafiaWars characters yet.

3 things made Facebook a success...

[Nohea]

1. "Safe" place to be and share. Obviously, they threw this out the window.
2. Best "Dashboard". The superior, clean interface to see updates made a lot of users abandon MySpace, etc. This will be a big hurdle for the aspiring replacement- ease of use and cleanness.
3. Critical-mass of user network. It has the people/friends you want. This hurdle can be overcome too, as long as the "open" movement doesn't fracture into a thousand sourceforge projects.

Honestly, we've got to support this effort, and i hope all us paranoid hackers can get on the bus in the same direction. We have so many great tools and infrastructure-- we just have to make it a no-brainer for grandpa and the tweens to use alike.

Your mother was a hamster

[billstewart]

and your father smelled of elderberries...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Easy solution.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

There's a simple solution to this problem: they just need to create an ILoveDiaspora facebook group.

Re:Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" respon

[Anonymous Coward]

>For Real People to use it, it will need to Just Work, First Time.

'Real people' use Twitter, which had its userbase grow spectacularly while its infrastructure scaled so poorly it was fail-whale left and right. So no, I don't think 'real people' are a fickle as you believe. The rest of your argument follows from this faulty premise.

Punked

[EspressoFreak]

So the story turned out to be a prank.

Everyone was using MySpace, how did Facebook win?

[George_Ou]

MySpace was dominating the social networking world, but the site design and the custom profiles were obnoxious. The owner of MySpace would brag about broken features like and say "it'll be fixed when it's fixed". Facebook came out with barely any users but quickly took over because they had a better user interface. This open source project could very well do the same thing, or it can force Facebook to adjust and reform for the better. Either way, the project will be a success.

Diaspora*

[massysett]

So what's going on with the asterisk in the name? A disclaimer?

* Prices and participation may vary. See store for details. We may actually steal all your data and post it publicly.

Distributed? User-run servers? Not worse than FB?

[Alien1024]

I read TFA. So yeah, distributed is the only way to pull this off without massive centralized resources. But unless run your own server 24/7 (something which "your mom" to paraphrase TFS is certainly not going to do), how does the network store your profile/status updates/etc? They get stored in some stranger's server, right? So instead of handing over your data to facebook, you hand it over to some perfect stranger(s). Yay, privacy-wise, this is so much better than facebook! Because this is not an invitation for spammers, voyeurs or otherwise malicious users to run servers so that they can eavesdrop on you.

I am sure they have some sort of secure design in mind for servers, but once this gets deployed, and especially being open source (which, in general, I have nothing against), it's just a matter of time before someone cracks the heck out of it.

Smart kids would

[Well-Fed Troll]

Leave the mom friended, but switch to using another service for the close friends. Post the nasty stuff on the new network only, leave the fb account with only mushy stuff.

"Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook"

[Alien1024]

Ironically Slashdot just greeted me with this suggestion: "Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook". Way to support Diaspora!

Ostracized my ass

[wye43]

Bull.Shit.
I avoid any social networking websites like the plague, but I don't have any problems finding someone if I feel like having a beer or going out. I go to parties and I organize parties, without any stupid website providing the "friends".
These social websites are providing "virtual friends", not real life friends. Tip: stand up and look around you, at your workplace, where you shop, at your places of entertainment, where you live, everywhere, there are people that have something in common with you. Those are real friends candidates, not a fat fuck saying "add me" on a stupid webpage.

So I call this bullshit.