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."

Comments

Re:Too late

[Spad]

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.

Render Facebook Obsolete?

[damn_registrars]

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.

You're Thinking About It Wrong

[eldavojohn]

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.

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 ... 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?

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 ;) No API ToS violations needed.

Re:Too late

[zr-rifle]

You can communicate with your friends without exposing your personal information to Facebook:

1. Register an account with a false name and leave it devoid of any personal content.
2. Add your friends telling them it's you, without revealing your complete name
3. Download the Pidgin IM (gratis & libre) client and use it to message your friends
4. Delete all your browser cookies relative to Facebook
5. ???
6. PROFIT!!!

Just don't be too revealing about yourself in your instant messages :)

Re:Too late

[imakemusic]

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...