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Creating a Better Facebook

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the empty-is-not-god dept.

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.

2 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. "it will be harder to convince your mom to log in" by SlappyBastard · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
  2. gnu social and friends by dns_server · · Score: 3, Informative

    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