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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.

25 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Social networks by sopssa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Social networks by epiphani · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      .
    2. Re:Social networks by MBGMorden · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    3. Re:Social networks by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Social networks by Aeros · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    5. Re:Social networks by IntlHarvester · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
    6. Re:Social networks by NickFortune · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
    7. Re:Social networks by Daengbo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Put identity in the browser.
    8. Re:Social networks by AnnoyaMooseCowherd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      This [ ] left intentionally [ ]
    9. Re:Social networks by Jarik_Tentsu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    10. Re:Social networks by FictionPimp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    11. Re:Social networks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    12. Re:Social networks by drooling-dog · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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"?

    13. Re:Social networks by BrokenHalo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Fundraise call is fundraise call by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Could happen by ZekoMal · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  4. The vast majority by Adustust · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Dirty Unix Joke by Kozz · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  6. X has been doing it for years! by DeanLearner · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  7. Right by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  8. Re:While I admire their goals... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

  9. Rebuttal of the "RFTA, it's distributed" responses by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. Re:I've seen something like that recently... by buchner.johannes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
  11. "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.
  12. 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