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:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[Ash-Fox]

Facebook is unique and the greatest thing out there. I'm just saying that *any* social platform should *not* going to lower your human-to-human interactions. If used properly, it will make them easier to organize and should in fact increase their likeliness of happening.

What a bland statement, that essentially applies to any technology that allows communications - shared calendars, journals, e-mail, internet relay chat etc.