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Could Open Source Render Facebook the Next AOL?
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."
I will not sign up for a Facebook account unless something serious changes with regards to privacy and security. However, I *would* sign up for a service that allowed communication with Facebook users, so that I can more easily keep in touch with people, without exposing myself to all the Facebook crap that I want to avoid.
Such a service would provide a gateway through which people could move away from Facebook if they don't like it without having to deal with the problem of losing access to all their friends and profiles.
No, Facebook will render Facebook obsolete. A lot of people are spending less time on their now than they did before. The novelty is wearing off, and eventually people won't care about it at all. It will eventually be replaced not by one single thing but by a variety of better things, including actual human-to-human interaction.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.
I never said to use the Facebook API.
... it would probably be a tree directory with a bunch of XML files and images. Maybe they want to put that into Diaspora and I would have a way that the system would autopopulate their diaspora with this archived data? Maybe they want to do their own thing with it? Maybe I could spend time doing this for Facebook and MySpace and Friendster and whatever you send me a link to?
;) No API ToS violations needed.
For a mental exercise let's imagine (and really maybe Perl is the better choice here) that I made a Ruby gem called SocialWalker or something of the sort and basically I used mechanize to log into Facebook after getting the user's credentials. Then the application connects to my webservice that sends the latest selector strings (harvested from the latest Facebook interface by hand with SelectorGadget) and also Nokogiri to quickly scrape off all the information and date/time stamps. I think the pictures would be a different kind of effort but completely feasible.
At that point, the user could save it in some documented open social file format that any application can read
Yeah, I might not be able to spider your posts on your friends walls and maybe I won't be able to get some information and maybe the new system won't let you back timestamp things so that data has to be put in the comments on your new photo albums.
Maybe Google could be petitioned to create this system instead of some developer who prefers to get drunk on the weekends instead of liberating social network users? Google is the god of scraping and caching after all.
But it would look like nothing more than one user looking at all their history one last time
My work here is dung.
Totally doesn't hold up. Back when MySpace was big, I don't think I knew more than 2 or 3 people with MySpace pages. It was pretty much exclusively a teen/college hangout.
These days the only people that I know who do NOT have Facebook pages are people without internet connections at all (lots of my family) and people who are security curmudgeons (like me). Even people who barely get on the internet use Facebook. Lots of people only even have an internet connection so that they CAN use Facebook.
Just don't be too revealing about yourself in your instant messages :)
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Yeah, I've had this idea as well. Because Facebook is simple. It's a webpage with text and pictures uploaded by users that has interfaces with others' web page. Rather then facebook or myspace, an open source alternative that people would run on their own. Websites with "user" uploaded content are, you know, old hat, so this boils down to protocols to deal with interaction between sites. And remember, this IS the social portion of social networks.
so what are all these interactions that need protocols:
-Establishing networks of trust, friendship, and hate. That whole "friends request" thing.
And that's essentially the only one that's required to make an open source distributed social network like facebook. Everything else is, not trivial, but it's been done. If it can be made cheap and simple enough (that itself a monumental task), then the masses could use it. But they won't, as inertial will keep them in facebook.
The rest is just features:
-Poke. It's one freaking message.
-Post on another wall/picture/whatnot. It's been done.
-Search through others pictures for tags of you.
-Set up events, invite people.
-Establish groups of people. The owner would host of course, but transferring ownership could be interesting.
I assume you're talking about Facebook instant messaging. Facebook have since changed their chat to use XMPP which means that most multi-protocol messengers can use Facebook chat. You still need to have a facebook account to use it though, so it doesn't really help Spad. I guess you could register an account and not enter any details...
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!