Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Could Open Source Render Facebook the Next AOL?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the can't-happen-fast-enough dept.

joabj writes "Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook's photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn't work better as Internet-wide standardized services. At the OSCON conference last week, the head of Identi.ca, an open source Twitter-like microblogging service, likened today's social networking services to the enormously proprietary online services of the early 1990s, like AOL or Prodigy. He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services, so too could open source social networking stacks, like OStatus, render walled garden services like Facebook obsolete."

30 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Too late by sopssa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.

    Difference with AOL (never even heard about Prodigy) versus email is that a lot of people used the standard email. I think AOL was mostly just US-centric too, I don't know anyone who would had actually used it. This was also time when internet was mostly used by geeks who understood it and valued open standards.

    Someone in these kind of stories always suggests that you set up your own Facebook-like service or just a website. That's just thinking too much of yourself - why would people visit your site just to see your stuff? Facebook is great because it lets me easily see them from all the people, even if I don't keep in touch with them so much.

    Also, how do you handle things like Facebook games and cooperation with people in them? Oh, you say Facebook games are stupid and people shouldn't play them. Arrogant attitudes like that don't really help either, because people obviously like the games. We aren't the ones to tell other people what they should or shouldn't like.

    In Facebook's case one big service works a lot better than thousand small ones. How would you even search for people, places, events and so on with them? It would go back to the @something.com convention which defeats the whole purpose.

    When I was recently visiting a different country I could easily search for the one guy I knew. From his connections I found everyone else I had met and also saw a lot of interesting events and businesses I wouldn't had otherwise known about. You can't really use a search engine for something you don't know about. This was the first time I actually understood how great service Facebook is - you just have to use it correctly.

    1. Re:Too late by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.

      Well let's travel backward in time to when Facebook was starting. Now let's rephrase your statement:

      They're too late to join the game. The problem is that MySpace already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about really bad user design and spam won't make normal people switch over and all the bands will stay on MySpace since Facebook doesn't host music.

      Now if we go a little further back to when MySpace was starting:

      They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Friendster already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about ... about ... what was wrong with Friendster again?

      Obviously the barrier you speak of has been broken down and it can be broken down again. You just have to understand your users better than Facebook does. And given the user feedback wouldn't you say that's possible to do?

      I would counter that the real big dealbreaker would be ability to import all pictures and posts from Facebook into the new system. So you would have the user run an app from their local machine that needs their username and password and then scrapes everything off of Facebook while a loading bar processes it and then loads it into the new system. Option at the end to delete the Facebook account and maybe send an e-mail to Facebook telling them that if they don't permanently remove your user data from all their servers, you will get litigious. Of course, that's just a fantasy of mine ...

      --
      My work here is dung.
    2. Re:Too late by mdwh2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In Facebook's case one big service works a lot better than thousand small ones. How would you even search for people, places, events and so on with them? It would go back to the @something.com convention which defeats the whole purpose.

      I'm not sure what the problem with that is. I much prefer the current situation with email, where we have thousands of email services (they don't have to be "small", btw - e..g, GMail), but I can email someone on another service.

      Compare with Facebook, where you can only message or read someone's status etc, if you join. And if they're on some other blog/networking site, you can't easily communicate.

      As for searching, well, I think we've managed to do reasonably well at being able to search information on the Internet on multiple sites...

      A similar issue applies to instant messaging - there is Jabber at least.

      There have been some attempts to interoperate and promote open common standards - things like OpenID, RSS, FOAF. Unfortunately part of the problem is that it's a much harder problem to crack (e.g., how do you deal with things like privacy settings, so that a status/blog entry is only visible to certain people?)

      Facebook is great because it lets me easily see them from all the people, even if I don't keep in touch with them so much.

      Yes indeed - but how well does it work when you're updating on Facebook, someone else is on Twitter, and another person is on LiveJournal? RSS helps in this regard.

    3. Re:Too late by DarkSarin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Problem is that most services (currently) that can communicate with FB users requires that you have a FB account--so that it knows WHICH FB users to communicate with.

      --
      "We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
    4. Re:Too late by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      uh, facebook had intertia. note the word. should a new site start grabbing people's interest and show that they aren't abusive of people's rights like facebook, facebook will be dropped as quickly as myspace was/is.

    5. Re:Too late by DJRumpy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I also had to laugh a few of the choice comments in there.

      (never even heard about Prodigy)

      Someone in these kind of stories always suggests that you set up your own Facebook-like service or just a website. That's just thinking too much of yourself - why would people visit your site just to see your stuff?

      You'd be surprised at how many people just surfed to find other people's 'home pages' on the net. I remember when I downloaded my first browser, I sat there for hours just trying random URL's to see what was out there, and trolling user home directories for HTML, Pics, etc. People have an unending curiosity about other people. Social sites like Facebook are the ultimate peeping tom sites. You get to peek into random people's lives and that seems to satisfy some weird internal need that humans have. Waaay back in the day, personal web sites were the epitome of lame, with pictures of their cats, dogs, houses, and then it just went down from there, but it let people put there stamp on a new electronic frontier of sorts. It didn't do much except to say "here I am", and it was enough.

      The draw of these sites is undeniable. If they should standardize on the protocols, the existing sites would adapt, and possibly new sites would pop up. As with all things social, fads come and go, people will move from site to site, and life goes on. Even Facebook will eventually become the next AOL, even if these standards never materialize. There will always be a new site to replace it that's shiny in some weird way.

    6. Re:Too late by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Wo says they'd have to visit your site? All your site has to do is serve out the data to any app or plugin that they want to run. You're thinking too 1990 here.

      And btw, open source won't turn facebook into another aol - facebook is doing that all by itself.

    7. Re:Too late by Lumpy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      AOl and Prodigy are the mee-too latecomers to the party as well. Compuserve was the king of them all and could not be de-throned...

      Until Prodigy came along with their clever GUI and lower rates...

      Then AOL ate prodigy's lunch with an even better dumbed down GUI and clicky interface as well as even lower rates..

      Then the internet happened, delivering more content. People could get even lower rates and avoid the busy phone line..

      Then broadband happened, this event ate AOL's lunch hard.

      Then friendster, Myspace, Facebook, etc.... If you offer something better that people like they will leave. Facebook is a tower of cards waiting to topple just like all the rest of them were.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    8. Re:Too late by hedwards · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sigh, AOL if it existed now would be superior to AOL back then as well. It's a fair comparison, it's a walled garden with a huge share of the market. Back when AOL was huge, there wasn't much internet to speak of, and due to it's huge slice of the market it was tough to compete with since few people really knew how to use the internet.

    9. Re:Too late by snowraver1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Also, if you would like to communicate with your friends, you can also:

      1. Call them (yes on the telephone).
      2. Visit them.
      3. Use one of dozens of Instant Messanger applications including: SMS, MS Messenger, and Blackberry Messenger.

      --
      Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
    10. Re:Too late by painandgreed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Also, if you would like to communicate with your friends, you can also:

      1. Call them (yes on the telephone).

      Let's see, time to call all my 254 friends to tell them the URL where the photos of my latest vacation are: Somewhere around 21 hours if I don't stop to talk about anything, eat, or go to the bathroom. Even if I limit to the friends that are local because I'm inviting them to BBQ this weekend, it's still around 10 hours.

      2. Visit them.

      Multiply the above times by 6 for local friends or turn hours into days for non-local friends.

      3. Use one of dozens of Instant Messanger applications including: SMS, MS Messenger, and Blackberry Messenger.

      Less people use those than use Facebook and you'd have to use multiple methods and keep track of which methods were used to contact which people.

      Face it, your solutions are trivial and irrational. We already used those methods and still have them to use. If it was easier, quicker, or of better quality to use those methods, Facebook and other social networking services, or even the internet never would have become widely used. It's like telling people to go back to reading magazines and dead tree newspapers rather than use the internet. Next you'll be telling people that if they want to visit friends or family, they can use a horse and buggy instead of a car. The simple matter of fact is that Facebook has features that work better than other methods and has reached critical mass where it can be considered a standard. For making announcements, posting photos, or scheduling events, there's not much else that does it as well with as many people using it. It is also one of those "dozens of Instant Messanger applications" that you were talking about.

    11. Re:Too late by snowraver1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I said communicate with friends, not "friends". I doubt that more than 10% of those 254 "friends" give a shit about your last vacation, and maybe 25% of that 10% give a shit about your BBQ.

      --
      Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
    12. Re:Too late by vux984 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Even at 10%, assuming I knew which ones they were, phone calls would take a couple of hours and visiting probably a couple of days if kept to local friends.

      God forbid you spend a couple hours or days talking with and/or visiting friends.

      You seem to rely on facebook to maintain stronger friendships, while offloading and distancing yourself from the actual interaction that stronger friendships result in.

    13. Re:Too late by skiman1979 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Let's see, time to call my 254 friends...

      I guess the term 'friend' is being used somewhat lightly.

      --
      Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
  2. Great, open source by elrous0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    An OSS Facebook will have hundreds of competing distros, several dozen kernel forks, Countless different versions of the standards that developers will argue over for years, horrid UI's, and no documentation. New users wishing to convert over from commercial Facebook will be told "Well, first you have to decide if you want to go with a RTH, KJG, RTY, or TTTY desktop interface; then you need to pick a client from this list which you can download from this obscure irc channel; then you need to config it to your router and find the drivers for your system; and you might also need to download and install Java, Greasemonkey, and a compiler to create binaries for your particular OS" and presented with a long list of bug fixes in lieu of a user manual.

    And before you mod me troll, know that this is exactly what Linux (and plenty of other OSS) looks like to a non-geek user.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Great, open source by Spad · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except that all that will need to be done by the people hosting the services, not the users using them.

    2. Re:Great, open source by RabbitWho · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think you're confusing OS - Operating system with OS - open source. They won't be making an operating system, they'll be making a website.
      To front-end users it doesn't have to be any more complicated than facebook or bebo or orkut, the same types of processes will go into making it but the processes will not be secret. That's what open source means.

      --
      it's under construction
    3. Re:Great, open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Except for the ones that are. Firefox is the best example of this but there are many more like Pidgin and VLC. But this isn't about open source its about open standards. No one is saying that the future of social networking should be open source, just that it should be open standard. How many of these "non-techies" have a problem using HTTP? PNG? They don't because they don't have to interact with them directly, they are just standards.

  3. Farmville! by AntEater · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unless they can get Farmville ported to an open platform most facebook users will never leave no matter hope open or technically superior an alternative is.

    --
    Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
  4. Technology isn't Facebook's value per se by MikeRT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Facebook provides a few things, in no small part because of its sheer size:

    1) Ability to find most of the people you know easily.
    2) Ability to share a lot of information in a really, really easy with people.
    3) Ability to do web-based social gaming in that same context.
    4) Bring together basic blog and community organizing features.

    The open source hurdles are really:

    1) Discovering users.
    2) Sharing assets between sites.
    3) Coordinating communications between sites (if one wants to create something analogous to Facebook's wall).

    Those are big hurdles, especially the ability (or perception of being able) to accurately discover other users one knows. Most of us here know that there is no guarantee that someone who claims to be a particular identity on Facebook isn't Chester the Molester, an enemy masquerading as a friend who didn't have an account before, etc. However, Facebook is perceived as safe by a lot of people, and an open environment would be perceived of in quite different terms.

  5. We need peer2peer social networking by coder111 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is the only way to ensure you control it. Distributed hosting, where friends host their friends' status if they are offline. Everything crypted/signed with public/private keys to ensure no spoofing. Ability to create pseudonyms and enter as much personal data as I want, and possibility of anonimity.

    Something like that I'd actually sign up for.

    --Coder

  6. Like AOL? Really? by nateand · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Did AOL ever have even close to 500 million users, much less worldwide? If facebook ever dies, it'll be a slow and drawn out process.

    1. Re:Like AOL? Really? by jeffmeden · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not impossible. Remember, no one is paying to be on Facebook (well except the advertisers) so no one has a buy-in mentality other than the time spent on their profiles. If there were a site that offered better privacy (by default), the ability to "suck" all the profile information from Facebook (simple API trick) and better features (like NO FUCKING FARMVILLE ALLOWED) then I think a lot of people would switch. Heck, you could have a service that simply pushed/pulled Facebook info to sync it up with this new site, so you wouldn't have to give up your facebook contacts as much as you would just have to give up visiting their godawful website.

  7. Something will topple Facebook... by Fortunato_NC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It might be open source, or it might not be, but eventually, someone will come along with a "better Facebook than Facebook", and it will slowly die.

    That's just creative destruction at work. It ALWAYS happens.

    Facebook was a better MySpace than MySpace.
    MySpace was a better Friendster than Friendster.
    Friendster was a better Classmates.com than Classmates.com. ...and so on...

    Google was a better Altavista than Altavista.
    AOL Instant Messenger was a better ICQ than ICQ.
    USENET was a better BBS than old-school dialup bulletin board.
    Books were better scrolls than scrolls.

    Something newer and better is going to come along. People talk about Facebook and the network effect "locking in" people, but creative destruction is even more powerful than the network effect.

    --
    Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
  8. Re:Seriously by bsDaemon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Exchange uses SMTP to send and receive mail. Linux and unencumbered BSDs pretty much killed off the commercial UNIX market. Solaris is limping along, and AIX is off in its little world, but that's not really saying much. OS X technically counts, but their target market isn't really the same. What happened to the gazillion other Unicies? All dead.

    I'm not sure I get the fixation everyone has with Microsoft. Exchange provides additional services which many people apparently find useful. Zimbra is a competing open source product, not SMTP. SMTP and IMAP is good enough for my purposes, and I suspect good enough for many other geek types, however we generally also attempt to avoid meetings and other crap that calendar sharing and whatnot provided by Exchange, Zimbra, Google Apps, or Lotus all provide.

  9. Re:Just a thought by c0d3g33k · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You're not "selling your data for nothing". You're exchanging access to your data for the ability to use a service without financial compensation to the service provider (who probably incurs substantial cost running said service). You deserve no "cut" - you already got access to Facebook. TANSTAAFL.

  10. Maybe Social Media will change by Pete+Venkman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't want a "new facebook" even if it's open source. Social media started off great, but from what I've seen a lot of it turns into posts about what someone ate for breakfast or how they hate rainy afternoons. I don't CARE about 99% of the stuff that my "friends" post about. If the cost of dumping facebook is no longer being plugged in to the social scene, then I say someone else can have it.

    I think a problem with social media is that there is a presumption that someone cares about YOU. Why do you make a facebook page? Because you want to let your friends know what YOU are up to. Who fucking cares? Do something worthwhile and then people who care can find out about you that way.

  11. You Betcha! by assertation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I see articles everyday that satisfaction is low among Facebook users. They are hanging around, in part, because there aren't any worthy alternatives from their perspective.

    Once Diaspora is out, I'm getting a few good friends to sign up with me, then I'm deleting my Facebook account.

    If Facebook pulls another "We did this, we didn't tell you, we don't care and you'll like it" stunt after that point, many other Facebook users will dump them too.

  12. I agree and disagree with the assumption by prefec2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    First, I have to disagree. Facebook and AOL are two different situations. Facebook has a massive user base and it has a lot of gravity sucking in a lot of other people. Even though users have multiple accounts in different other social network platforms. Why is that so? Because these other platforms provide special services in certain domains. For example linked is not there to share you latest dog or pussy or "I am so drunk, look i fell in a pool and hit my head" photos.

    AOL on the other side was a mee too e-mail and content-service. However, many people lived outside of AOL. And the user base outside of AOL was growing faster than AOL itself.

    Second, I have to agree. Facebook alienated many people with its behavior. And as a commercial company they cannot stop, as their business model is based on selling your private information and information based on massive data mining on personal information. And while people have learned (at least partially) that it is better to control your personal information, they will be eager to switch to another service. For instance a distributed one. but only if it is as usable as FB.

  13. If you want to replace Facebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I suspect that if you can figure out how to solve the "any one of my idiot friends can post something that could cause me trouble" problem you're social network system will have a good shot at replacing facebook in time.

    The reason this will catch on, is because it will be more popular with high school and college students who typicaly do enough stupid/illegal stuff that they're concerned about adults finding out.