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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.
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.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
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.
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!
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.
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.
One that hath name thou can not otter
IF they get reasonably big, FB will just NOMNOM them.
~Mekkah
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.
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So the Salz-guy's plan is sweeter then the Zucker-guy's one. Am I the only one fearing a bad german joke ?
Saw this article this morning. Don't overlook the "dirty Unix joke" on the blackboard. ;)
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
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
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.
If everyone leaves Facebook, who will feed my cows?
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.
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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 .. :)
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 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.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/websites_stop
Pretty much covers it.
Cause, who wouldn't want to join a "A Road Rapists" social network, right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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...
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
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.
Not everyone sells out. Look at craigslist. Just sayin.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
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.
Just Work, First Time.
Cuil
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
That would be the best way to gather a lot of people discussing how the product should be, and never actually deliver anything.
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
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.
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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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Drupal has been providing open-source community plumbing for years.
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.
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.
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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.
Carpet Cleaning
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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?
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.
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.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I'm totally making a facebook fan page for this so all my friends will know about it!
Wait...
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:)
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
The "metaserver" can be just a tracker. And if you're scared of a central server needed for authentication, look no further than kerberos.
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.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
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.
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.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
and your father smelled of elderberries...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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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
There's a simple solution to this problem: they just need to create an ILoveDiaspora facebook group.
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.
So the story turned out to be a prank.
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.
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.
Penny - plain text accounting
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.
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.
Ironically Slashdot just greeted me with this suggestion: "Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook". Way to support Diaspora!
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.