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

Too late

[sopssa]

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.

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.

Re:Too late

[eldavojohn]

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 ...

Re:Too late

[mdwh2]

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.

Re:Too late

[DarkSarin]

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.

Re:Too late

[PerfectionLost]

Try trillian. They have a facebook plugin.

Re:Too late

[DarkKnightRadick]

I like that fantasy, tell me more about it! lol

Re:Too late

[PerfectionLost]

Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.

Re:Too late

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:Too late

[Hylandr]

The frightening thing is there appears to be the concept that a website is any way comparable to the multi-user *dialup* system that AOL originated as. AOL had been compared to the bus load of Ebola victims tossing rotten cabbage a the other passers by on the information super highway. Facebook in no way compares to this.

There were games available on AOL too. But these games were things like Air Warrior. ( MMOG Air Combat of Kesmai fame )

In every except the gaming facebook is superiour to AOL. facebook games, to me are insulting compared to what I have done in the past "online". AOL was international, as was prodigy, compuserve etc. Remember, this was done over phone lines, no internet access. There was a network of forums called FIDO and a few others. the Internet existed well before the world wide web and to the best of my knowledge, was never utilized by AOL, Prodigy or Compuserve.

So, lets just drop the comparison now ok?

- Dan.

Re:Too late

[DJRumpy]

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.

Re:Too late

[Hylandr]

Corrections. Was never utilized before 1997*

Re:Too late

[tomhudson]

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.

Re:Too late

[ledow]

As does pidgin - because Facebook now supports open standards:

http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

Re:Too late

[jridley]

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.

Re:Too late

[natehoy]

Which, of course, is why you'd want to use a screenscraper and not use the API.

The site design changes frequently, however, probably to prevent just such screenscraping. So it wouldn't be easy.

Re:Too late

[Lumpy]

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.

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

[Lumpy]

facebook is already pissing off the more techie users. I want RSS feeds that I can filter. Facebook wont give me that. I found my OWN rss feed that I have to pull down with my own server and parse like a madman, but I cant get all the data streams I want.

I want to do my own data mining to aggregate the ton of crud that facebook has in it. I also want to have friend tiers.. Friend tier 1, 2,3,4 and 5... Make each post have the ability to apply a tier X and above can see this.

same for privacy info...

Re:Too late

[hedwards]

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.

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...

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither Trillian nor Pidgin allow one to communicate with Facebook users without becoming a Facebook user oneself.

Re:Too late

[EvilBudMan]

Obviously, your comparing apples and oranges. 500 million plus is a strong barrier. Google could have owned this and maybe still can.

Re:Too late

[corbettw]

(e.g., how do you deal with things like privacy settings, so that a status/blog entry is only visible to certain people?)

Require whatever microblogging software you're using to use public/private key authentication. To add someone as a friend, you add their public key which they have provided. To read a status update, you provide your private key. If it doesn't match one of the public keys in the authorized keys file, you don't get access. All of this could be handled behind the scenes and be invisible to users.

Re:Too late

[commodore64_love]

You seem to have a lot of hatred for AOL, but I remember when it was called Quantum Link (see link) and offered in the mid-80s a web type interface before the web existed. It also provided the earliest Online Sims games (called Club Caribe). And although I preferred to use FIDOnet and Usenet, AOL did have decent forums for asking questions. Those posts were answered by a national audience, which was a huge step-up from the local BBSes.

My memories of AOL are generally positive, and I still use them today. $7/month is a hard-to-beat deal for net access.

http://www.qlinklives.org/

Re:Too late

[EvilBudMan]

I think what is really making FB work is it's marketing potential. You can advertise there and get a lot of bang for your buck. They are going to make money doing that for sure. We are in a cycle now where people want closed systems. This will change of course when everyone has that but it goes in cycles. FB has 5 more years.

Re:Too late

[Archangel Michael]

The problem with Facebook, is the very thing that makes it work. People like you want walled garden for your life, when in reality, there is no such thing.

You want privacy, but on the other hand, you want people to know how to find you, which means breaching privacy.

I haven't gained any friends since joining FB, and I'm not losing any friends if I leave FB. I don't count new people "friends" and online people are not friends until we've become involved IRL.

Lastly, I don't put anything on FB that I don't want the whole world knowing. Most of the "Privacy" crap people complain about is laziness and stupidity. Most of the information on FB about me can be found elsewhere by Googling me. And it isn't that much.

Re:Too late

[Comboman]

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

Not to mention an endless supply of free 'blank' discs delivered directly to your home.

Re:Too late

[ViViDboarder]

That would be great! There is nothing that facebook offers me except the ability to share photos with friends and the get updated info about my friends. There already are a lot of alternatives out there actually. Google now has profiles even. I am starting to move my photos over to flickr now anyway to support Geo Tagging and full resolution copies. Also, check out FaceDown. It's a java app that downloads all your photos. Then you could re-upload them to whatever service you want. Except that a good computer user should have the originals backed up so they aren't stuck with the crappy compressed versions facebook was using.

Re:Too late

[snowraver1]

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.

Re:Too late

[BrokenHalo]

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

Yep. I don't have a Facebook account, primarily because I don't care for the way it seems to swallow up the lives of its users. However, I and most of my friends use Skype, which works elegantly as a combination of IM and VOIP. Skype makes it clear when one is or is not available to be contacted, so no-one has to get huffy about whether or not you've seen such-and-such a Facebook message or email.

I'm not about to apologise for such an old-school approach - but it does help me define clearly how much I'm ready to let the internet intrude in my life..

Re:Too late

[LWATCDR]

The problem really isn't that nobody can replace facebook.
The problem is that if and or when it happens it will be another walled garden.
Distributed open standards? You mean like for IM?
Jabber has been around for how long? And so far only Google seems to really use it.
It is a shame because it is a very powerful and useful system.
Had it been around from the start every ISP could have run a jabber server like they do email.
Jabber servers can talk to each other and wham you have an open standards based IM....
So why does MSN, AIM, YahooIM and goodness knows how many other IM standards still exist?

Re:Too late

[spiralx]

Except that other than the ability to add friends the only 'social' features of Myspace were uploading photos (no tagging/albums though) and posting a comment on someone's page. Facebook offers an order of magnitude more ways of interacting with people, and they all support conversations with as many participants as want to be involved.

And that's ignoring quite how crap Myspace's interface was when Facebook went public; even now it's years behind.

Re:Too late

[PerfectionLost]

Actually, the Trillian pluggin will pull up the last 10 or so things that have happened, including posts and comments, in addition to chat.

Re:Too late

[morari]

AOL had been compared to the bus load of Ebola victims tossing rotten cabbage a the other passers by on the information super highway. Facebook in no way compares to this.

I think you just made the comparison toe FaceBook sound even more appropriate!

Re:Too late

[larpon]

Kopete (KDE4 version at least) have the ability as well via the Jabber/XMPP protocol (from which you can also connect to GTalk and various other Jabber based services).
Tutorial here.

Re:Too late

[imakemusic]

Interesting. I guess you still need an account though.

Re:Too late

[mandelbr0t]

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.

And people would instantly start making their own communities and linking back to Facebook, which would ironically turn into a meta-community, providing directory and API services to connect a bunch of Facebook clones. Somehow I don't see this happening. Making Facebook better would destroy it.

Re:Too late

[Jane_Dozey]

Jabber was renamed XMPP. XMPP is what facebook uses for chat.

Re:Too late

[Schuler]

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.

While I see what you're getting, it wasn't necessarily the case that "everyone" was on MySpace before Facebook, or Friendster before MySpace.
I was a college freshmen when "The Facebook" was available for me and I hadn't even heard of MySpace at that point in time. No mention of it from my friends or anyone I knew. I knew about the live journal/xanga type blog things but those were obviously different in terms of feature set.

Maybe I was an aberration but it seemed like the barrier to entry was much lower than 5-6 years ago. Facebook has amassed a much larger following that will make them harder to knock down. Unlike with AOL, People have put significant time and effort into Facebook with their profiles, their interests, games and especially with their photos (uploading and tagging). The chat capability is also nice in that you can communicate with the person by just knowing their and not having to get their screenname or gmail ID.

However, the mighty can eventually fall. I've kept AOL Instant Messenger since the family AOL account was canceled in 2003 and used it for some years after. I've barely touched it recently though and I only know a small handful of people who use it as their primary IM correspondence. Your Facebook photo exporter would be a fantastic way to recoup that time spent uploading pictures, although there would need to be some mechanism to tie the photos to everyone who was tagged. We shall see what the next latest and greatest thing to come out is. I can only imagine it'd be a very slow weaning off of Facebook

Re:Too late

[MonsterTrimble]

I would love to see a court battle over me telling a program (which uses Facebook's APIs) to download my own stuff (which I put up there in the first place) onto my hard drive.

Re:Too late

[N1AK]

Skype makes it clear when one is or is not available to be contacted, so no-one has to get huffy about whether or not you've seen such-and-such a Facebook message or email.

If your friends would get huffy because they sent you a message on Facebook and you didn't respond (even though they won't even know whether you've seen it or not yet) then your friends are the issue not the technology used.
Secondly, how does a chat client like Skype in any way define how much you want to let the internet intrude into your life? If you mean you don't have the willpower to use Facebook without becoming obsessive about the apps then you've made the right call based on your personal situation and again this isn't a tech issue. Personally, I'm fine with checking my friends Facebook status updates every day or so and using it as an email replacement for some communication.

Re:Too late

[MistrBlank]

Blame the users, don't blame the service. I use Facebook with a nice level of privacy I'm comfortable with, I don't incessantly update my status, I don't constantly check my account.

Like all things computer related, it would be great if it weren't for the freaking users f'ing it up.

Re:Too late

[FireFury03]

Facebook don't support xmpp s2s (nor do I believe have they expressed any intention of ever doing so)

Re:Too late

[PerfectionLost]

I suspect if you were do it for yourself, it wouldn't be an issue. When you try to do it for 100 million people who are not you is when it becomes an issue.

Re:Too late

[Thinboy00]

FB is never going to become federated with anything else, because it would be their death knell.

Re:Too late

[westlake]

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

It's not all unusual for the first entrant in a new market to fall by the wayside. But it becomes much - much - harder to overtake the mass market leader when you are third in line. Case in point: Linux on the desktop.

Re:Too late

[turbotroll]

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.

Who modded up this drivel as insightful? Failbook has approx 500 million accounts, as in database entries, not necessarily real persons, because of duplicates and forgeries. Even if that (admittedly large) number consisted only of genuine active users, it still hardly represents "everybody".

Could we now please finally quit with the ad nauseam fallacy that "everybody is on Failbook"?

Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.

And your definition of "normal people" is - what?

Re:Too late

[VGPowerlord]

but... but... this year is the year of the Linux desktop! Netcraft confirms it!

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

What are they gonna do, cancel your Facebook account?

Re:Too late

[gorzek]

Same here. I don't play Facebook games--I disable the notifications for them.

I read people's status updates when I feel like it. I update mine occasionally.

I check my FB maybe once every week or two.

I do find it a useful way to chat with people (through XMPP), since some of my friends don't use any IM clients.

I also keep the privacy settings locked down.

I use FB to the degree I want and ignore the stuff I don't care about. Why is this so difficult for some people?

Re:Too late

[0100010001010011]

Definitely not too late.

My Parents are now on facebook. As are all of their friends, which is great for them and reconnecting (VS something like classmates.com). However when they let anyone register it turned it into Facebook's own Eternal September. "Likes" and "Groups" are thankfully replacing the stupid forwards that people send out.

I'd say 1/4 of LameBook and FailBook posts are because you friended a parent and they commented on stuff. The groups are nice, but a pain to setup as are controls of who can see what. I want an entire sandbox (without the pain of having to create an entire separate account).

You bet your ass I'm going to be looking for the next best thing, as are any college students that would have fit the original Facebook demographic. My facebook page is going to stagnate as I move on just like my MySpace page did when I moved to FaceBook as did my Geocities page when I moved to MySpace.

Re:Too late

[curunir]

The AOL analogy shouldn't have mentioned email. Email existed before AOL started offering the service and AOL's email offering could always communicate with non-AOL users.

The better corollary is AIM. AOL's chat was the same walled garden that FB is. And, like FB, you signed up because everyone in your social group was signed up for the service. There were other competitors (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ), but AIM was the most popular. Eventually someone decided that an open source approach based on open standards would make sense, and today we have Jabber, though it's never really displaced AIM. But the competitive pressure forced AOL to open AIM to non-AOL subscribers.

That is what will happen to Facebook. They have closed competitors that aren't too popular and people will create an open competitor that will get just enough traction so that it forces Facebook to play nice and allow things like exporting your data out of their app and interacting/communicating with Facebook users without needing an account. But, in the end, most users will stay with Facebook and all the controversy will fade away.

BTW...what self-respecting Slashdotter has never heard of Prodigy? Compuserve? GEnie?

Re:Too late

[Americano]

Good luck explaining to various friends why they're not "tier 1" friends. :)

Really, I'd rather see support for simple named groups, and be able to set access to each item by those groups - essentially ACLs (1..n groups of people can see post X) instead of the three-layer Unix-like security they have today: ("Friends", "Friends of friends", "Everybody"). There are some things I'd say to my friends which I wouldn't necessarily say to my family, or simply things that maybe my friends wouldn't care about that my family would - and vice versa.

Make it so all comments and conversation about a particular item inherit the visibility characteristics of the item they're associated with, and you'd take care of a lot of the issues with grouping.

If you think about it, you can probably partition your friends into 5-10 easily named "groups", and if membership is non-exclusive (e.g., someone can be a member of more than one group), that would reflect "real life" a lot better than the current setup, or a tiering mechanism. If it's a general-purpose item, you can post it to "all", if it's not general purpose, mark the checkbox next to which groups you want to share the item with. If you don't want to share with groups, specify 1..n particular people by name, or mix group names with specific names.

There's no precise digital equivalent to the messy analog that is real life relationships. But, off the top of my head, I could probably break down my friend list into the following categories - there are some people who'd fit in multiple categories, and probably some outlier people who would all get lumped into "acquaintances", but you get the point.

-- Hockey Team
-- Family
-- Colleagues
-- High School Classmates
-- College Classmates
-- Book Club
-- Red Cross Volunteers
-- Casual Acquaintances
-- Business Contacts
-- Friends

Re:Too late

[turbotroll]

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.

You can barely buy a new mobile phone without a client for that shit pre-installed these days.

Re:Too late

[morgauxo]

Your argument makes sense except that I would have said the same thing about MySpace at one point in time but look at them now.

Re:Too late

[curunir]

MySpace may not, but the Friendster point is valid.

Friendster had scalability problems that resulted in extremely slow performance. It made the site almost unusable. But the last straw was when they deleted all the fakester accounts. They basically took one of the best features of the site and a chunk of creativity on the part of their users and threw it away.

The point being, Facebook will remain on top as long as they don't screw up too badly. But never underestimate the effect of a massive blunder on their part. The privacy problems they've had seem like the first step in that direction...not enough on its own, but if they follow it up with another event/decision that angers users, that may start the exodus. And as Friendster found out, once people leave, they're gone forever.

Re:Too late

[LWATCDR]

I thought that it might as does Gtalk. But the XMPP servers are separated and are not inter connected.
The idea was that XMPP/jabber would be the IM protocol and everyone would use it.
It really is a good protocol and very flexible.
Thing is that we still have AIM, MSN messenger, and Yahoo messenger.

Re:Too late

[Shadow Wrought]

An even bigger difference is taht Facebook is free. AOL and Prodigy were pay. The standards that killed off AOL and Prodigy (and CompuServe, et al) did so because they were free not because they were open. I understand that without being open they probably wouldn't have been free, but free as in beer is what established them.

Re:Too late

[prostoalex]

"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?" - Well, you can do that with Open Graph protocol with the caveat that it works for pages only. But you can host your own entity, or, like TripAdvisor, create thousands of Facebook page equivalents all controlled by you.

Re:Too late

[aztracker1]

Easier still, don't put *anything* *anywhere* online that you wouldn't want the public to have access to. Assume if your friends can see it, so can anyone else.

Re:Too late

[joshki]

You've completely missed the point.

An open stack for social networking would allow anyone to use any social networking tool to interact with all the others. Can't find the game you like on anything but Facebook? Stick with Facebook, but you'll also be able to interact with people who don't want Facebook accounts, because they don't care about games.

An open stack allows all the services to interact, exchange events, status updates, pictures, etc.

Re:Too late

[painandgreed]

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.

Re:Too late

[Dragonslicer]

Facebook have since changed their chat to use XMPP

No, they didn't change their IM system, they only added an XMPP gateway that you can use. The easiest thing to notice is the latency in people going online and offline.

Before the XMPP gateway, IM programs simply replicated the HTTP requests that the web chat uses.

Re:Too late

[Yert]

I do this already - I have a "Friends & Family" group that is my default posting level - there's about 20 people in there. Then there's my "Friends" - roughly 100. Then there's Facebook's "Friends of Friends" and "Everyone" levels of access, which I rarely use unless I'm standing on a soapbox.

It was hard to explain to my boss the other day, who I'm very friendly with, why he wasn't seeing me post very often... but hey.

Re:Too late

[imakemusic]

Ah, that's what I get for using English, I guess. Possibly the most ambiguous language there is.

Personally I would consider adding an XMPP gateway a change to their IM system. Obviously they kept the old system as well but they must have changed something otherwise it would still be the same. I suppose it is a question of what you define to be their "chat system".

Re:Too late

[nametaken]

Which is funny. It operates like this to protect everyones privacy.

Re:Too late

[Bryan3000000]

You do not know the history or understand the situation. AOL had a complete private network before internet access was even possible. It competed with the likes of Compuserve and Prodigy. All were private networks, and the internet did not exist outside of universities. Once the internet became available, the private networks gradually became irrelevant. At first, they offered internet access in addition to their private network. Then, nobody cared about them any longer.

Facebook is exactly like this. The type of open source system contemplated here is a distributed system - there is no need for you to run your own facebook - like site. It's a bit more like bittorrent, to use a very bad analogy. If it were possible to do everything you do on Facebook without setting up your own site and without having to do it using a private entity like Facebook, well, then why would you? Over time, people would start using the open, decentralized alternative. Facebook would get gradually less attractive, because it would end up having less of the really interesting people and features over time.

From a historical perspective, this is not only possible, but absolutely inevitable. Private systems always go down in favor of open markets, unless the open markets are forcibly limited. Even then, the inevitable always happens.

Re:Too late

[snowraver1]

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.

Re:Too late

[Dragonslicer]

The only change to their chat system was adding a layer that converts between XMPP and the system they had before (and still have). If you use only the web interface, there is no XMPP involved at all. The core of the service is still their own chat system, not an XMPP server.

Re:Too late

[TemporalBeing]

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.

However, FB seems to be integrating with a number of various services, e.g. Yahoo!, so that you can access all from one location. Now I haven't tried to tie Yahoo! and FB together (not that I would ever want to) so I am not sure if it requires a FB account, or if it can create one for you (if you don't have one) using your Yahoo! login automatically - thereby centralizing everything out to other sources. Essentially, FB is seems to be going more towards an OpenID (though not using OpenID necessarily) route for integration. So it will likely be that at some point they will get rid of the FB accounts and just use a generic account provided by a third-party - which they may already be somewhat doing. It's just a matter of time.

Should that ever happen, things like what the article mentions could provide a quick and easy substitute to FB. Or, for that matter, if they go now and use things like OpenID they could still beat FB out of the market since there are a lot of services (e.g. Yahoo!) that use OpenID still. So just b/c FB has 500 million users does not mean it can't be toppled quickly by openly operated systems like what the article brings to light.

Re:Too late

[Orange Crush]

I don't know about the fakester accounts, I doubt it upset that many people. The damage was already done by their inability to scale up. That's ultimately what did Friendster in. Well, that and the fact that MySpace had plenty of iron on hand to handle the deluge of Friendster refugees.

Re:Too late

[Americano]

The problem I see mostly now is the whole "Someone has commented on someone else's private photo, and now you can see it" - it's the weird interactions around those varying levels of security that I dislike.

If I make a photo visible to a group or two, I don't want anybody else seeing members of those groups commenting on it - from what I've seen, comments and other interactions don't honor (or at least, don't always honor) the privacy & security settings of the item they're in response to, and that seems problematic to me.

Re:Too late

[Just Some Guy]

Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.

I give a rat's ass about what their ToS says I can or can't do with copies of the information I personally uploaded to their site?

Re:Too late

[Bing Tsher E]

The site design changes frequently, however, probably to prevent just such screenscraping. So it wouldn't be easy.

The pages always have to remain legible for Facebook users. I'd say that no matter how Facebook tries to obfuscate things, it's still a trivial task compared to even a primitive OCR program.

Sure, they've got a bunch of money now, and they're The Man and want to stay that way. Doesn't mean they will.

Re:Too late

[Weezul]

I donno, maybe, maybe not.

If geeks made full use of an open standard social networking site, like say friend-to-friend file sharing, yeah I think people will join. And open source might play some role because you'll never get the people if you don't deploy freind-to-friend file sharing. Why is file sharing legal here? Well, why is sharing your family videos legal? duh.

Facebook cannot easily be killed, true. If however there are other massive communities that cannot easily be subsumed into facebook, well that'll put a damper on their party. Facebook cannot facilitate music & movie piracy.

Ideally, you want some OpenID like web site account based system for joining with some non-web site affiliated alternative client that supplies friend-to-friend file sharing. I'm sure you'll eventually get all the "also ran" facebook's like Hi5 on board with sharing producing some OpenId network of web accounts. The issue will be letting users forward their accounts elsewhere, especially without giving the original host any new data, and especially^2 forwarding to their own P2P clients.

Re:Too late

[Bing Tsher E]

The default on Facebook is: "turn any 'event' into the biggest possible chunk of spam."

Re:Too late

[beothorn]

The same way, orkut is losing users to facebook in Brasil.

Re:Too late

[vux984]

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.

Re:Too late

[skiman1979]

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

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

Re:Too late

[kaizokuace]

having friends to chat on your facebook IS still giving them some personal info!

Re:Too late

[Culture20]

But there were scores of college students getting email accounts that weren't AOL, and (since I worked for an ISP at the time, I know) there were scores of non-AOL home users who just wanted email to leave messages for their kids (because their kids always had their modem using the dorm phone line). It exploded from college use, just like Facebook did. Maybe if college groups like frat houses sought this open source social network as a "better way to 'control exposure'" then it would eventually bleed Facebook dry like Facebook did to MySpace.

Re:Too late

[painandgreed]

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

No, strong friendships are maintained the same way they always are, going out and doing stuff. I'm not getting rid of my phone or car and giving up on traditional methods when they're appropriate, but they are not the solution to everything. It's the medium and weak friendships that are maintained by Facebook so they can mature into strong ones again rather than drift away into being forgotten. That it allows certain functions such as announcements and events coordination be handled for all types of friends easier than other methods and in less time seems to be Facebooks killer app. Nevermind simply wasting time with games or status changes which lots of people seem to do that put them on Facebook and thus enhances the other features for people who don't.

Re:Too late

[painandgreed]

Totally doesn't hold up.

I think it would hold up. I can remember when Yahoo was a verb and nobody had ever heard of Google. Internet users have been found to be a fickle crowd and they can change around like college kids going to the new bar that's in vogue at the given time. If Facebook wants to keep its position, it'll have to keep up with times and fill in any weak spots. Besides security, they need a decent blogging function and ways to group friends and other pages into separate categories so we can see what we want to see. If somebody makes a better widget, people will start using that widget, especially if one sits on their laurels and doesn't add in new features as they are developed in a still growing web.

Re:Too late

[tomhudson]

Sounds great. Publish it as a spec. Or start your own "filter your facebook" site. Users certainly have the right to access their own data ...

Re:Too late

[FatLittleMonkey]

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.

You don't want to try to appeal to normal people. Then it would be lame, and early adopters would shun it. You want it to seem exclusive. You want something built for people who don't get what they want from Facebook. Start with developers. Then business professionals. Then tech literate hangers-on. Then college students. By then it's just a web standard. "Web 4.0".

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. We aren't the ones to tell other people what they should or shouldn't like.

So we shouldn't, but Facebook should? This is one of the advantages of a new open system. New uses that the system's creators never imagined. The more open it is, the more creative people can be with it.

Re:Too late

[DragonWriter]

But there were scores of college students getting email accounts that weren't AOL, and (since I worked for an ISP at the time, I know) there were scores of non-AOL home users who just wanted email to leave messages for their kids (because their kids always had their modem using the dorm phone line). It exploded from college use, just like Facebook did. Maybe if college groups like frat houses sought this open source social network as a "better way to 'control exposure'" then it would eventually bleed Facebook dry like Facebook did to MySpace.

Lots of college students now are getting Google Apps accounts, as many colleges are "going Google" -- so an almost perfect analogy (though with Google its somewhat more likely to be open-specification than open-source, though some Google offerings are both) to email would be if Google rolled open social networking into Google Apps for Domains.

Currently, Google's existing social offerings are tied to Google Accounts but not, IIRC, available from Apps accounts, but which apps are available to Apps accounts is obviously subject to change.

Re:Too late

[grcumb]

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

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

Actually, in this context, 'friend' means an Int with a fencepost error.

Re:Too late

[Risen888]

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.

The exact same thing was said... about Facebook... when Myspace ruled the earth.

Shit, I can remember back at the dawn of time, when a friend of mine told me it was stupid to get my internet through my phone company because "Everything's on AOL anyway."

The half lives of internet phenomena are extremely low. Facebook's no different.

Re:Too late

[FlyMysticalDJ]

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.

If that is your experience, then I suspect your life is sad and lonely. I can tell it's already bitter since you've degenerated into swearing.

Seriously? You're calling a guy sad and lonely because he only has two dozen people to tell about his vacation and 6 good friends to come to a BBQ at his house? That seems a little extreme. I doubt that anyone truly has time to connect deeply with 254 people.

Re:Too late

[MidnightBrewer]

Facebook is great because somebody else has already set up the service and the tools in a way that the 95% of the world that couldn't be bothered to set up their own website don't have to. Also, the fragmentation you mention between Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal would only become worse with a decentralized standard. We already have it, in fact; it's called the web.

Open source will revolutionize social networking the same way it did desktop computing. We all remember the days of Windows domination, you know, before Linux took over with its thousand-and-one distribution flavors.

Re:Too late

[lonecrow]

I disagree completely. A large head start is not an absolute defense in the long run. My money is on a distributed system in the long run. Face book is the anti-internet and must and will die because of it. I am betting that a set of protocols will be developed that will essentially extend blogs into Facebook like profiles and link them via a p2p system.

I mean really I don't see what the big deal is about face book, its basically weaving together multiple RSS feeds and a directory. These are not huge problems to solve. Ditto for the games. Just think about all those multiple player flash games that already exist on the net. Now imagine adopting a single sign on solution like OpenID.

Re:Too late

[cthulhu11]

You're really afraid that someone might -- gasp! -- sell on the black market a photo of you with your dog? I'm all for privacy, but don't understand the knee-jerk hysteria wrt Facebook.

Re:Too late

[cyclomedia]

Still can't figure out what your gripe is (disclaimer, i have a honeypot facebook account that contains nothing but my name, dob and what to search for on google to find me). If you can use facebook chat with XMPP then it's XMPP. it's an interface standard. Next you'll be griping that Samba doesnt impliment SMB properly because they dont force you to use NTFS underneath it.

Re:Too late

[Dragonslicer]

Just that the statement that Facebook changed their chat system to XMPP is inaccurate. The underlying system hasn't changed, there's just an XMPP wrapper. For a lot of people, the distinction won't matter, but around Slashdot, some people might have certain expectations of XMPP that Facebook's gateway won't support.

Re:Too late

[mdwh2]

Facebook is great because somebody else has already set up the service and the tools in a way that the 95% of the world that couldn't be bothered to set up their own website don't have to.

Well no, people would still set up the servers for you with open standards. It would be like saying that standardised email couldn't work, because 95% of the world can't be bothered to run their own email server. That doesn't mean we all have to use AOL email though.

Also, the fragmentation you mention between Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal would only become worse with a decentralized standard.

The problem with fragmentation is that there is little way to communicate between them. If this problem was solved, fragmentation wouldn't be a problem. Yet, open standards meant that email got far more fragmented, but the point is that isn't a problem.

We already have it, in fact; it's called the web.

The web doesn't solve the problems we are discussing here.

Open source will revolutionize social networking the same way it did desktop computing. We all remember the days of Windows domination, you know, before Linux took over with its thousand-and-one distribution flavors.

What has desktop computing got to do with this? This also isn't really about open source, but about open standards. You'd rather go back to the days where you could only email someone if you both used the same AOL email or whatever, because having open standards and a thousand-and-one flavours of email servers and clients that we have now is evidently terrible?

Re:Too late

[Lennie]

Something like this maybe ?:

"100 Million Facebook Pages Leaked On Torrent Site

A directory containing personal details about more than 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on an Internet file-sharing site. The 2.8GB torrent was compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security, who created a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook's open access directory, which lists all users who haven't bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines."

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/7/28/100-million-facebook-pages-leaked-torrent-site/
http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/07/28/1350222/100-Million-Facebook-Pages-Leaked-On-Torrent-Site?art_pos=3

Re:Too late

[boxwood]

but sometimes "friends" can become real-life friends. Yes there's a lot of people on my facebook friends list that I don't hang out with regularly, but if I happen to see they're going to in my town I might go meet up for a beer or whatever. Usually it goes like this: Meet someone have a couple of drinks -> exchange FB info -> maybe a week later see in their status that they're going out on the weekend -> send a message and arrange to meet up -> meet up and have some fun.

If you're limited to phone, it goes like this: Meet someone have a couple of drinks -> exchange phone numbers -> write their phone number in my address book -> a week later phone everyone in my address book to find out if anyone is going out for drinks? Not going to happen.

Using FB just makes it a lot easier to make new friends.

Re:Too late

[commodore64_love]

>>>Try trillian.

Trisha McMillian? Yeah she was great. But not as much fun as Rachael Leigh Cook (the egg smashing girl).

Re:Too late

[man_of_mr_e]

You want privacy, but on the other hand, you want people to know how to find you, which means breaching privacy.

Actually, my problem with Facebook is that it tells all your friends who your other friends are. Let's say you have friends you don't want the rest of your friends to know about, or maybe you have acquaintences that don't need to know what your family members are doing.

Privacy is about choosing to give information to people, not having it revealed without your consent. It has nothing to do with "doing something wrong" (although you may in fact be doing something wrong), it's about choice. Yes, you can choose not to be a member of the service, and you can choose who to add as friends, but it's kind of an all or nothing proposition...

Re:Too late

[MidnightBrewer]

It seems you may have completely misunderstood my post (and you missed the <sarcasm> tags I kept putting in there at least once); perhaps I was too vague in how I answered. I'll give it my best shot and try to clarify my meaning.

You say that people would set up the servers for us with open standards. They do that now, and many with sophisticated turnkey solutions that completely remove the learning curve from the equation (e.g. squarespace.com) What are you proposing we add that can improve on the open standards we already have?

These services are defeated by Facebook because they're decentralized; people want go to Facebook on the internet in the same way that they go to their favorite bar in real life. They crave a group social aspect that the open-standard model proposed here would find difficult to replace. The reason Facebook is successful is not because everybody's already on it, but because it offers a sense of commonality that people like to snuggle up in like a security blanket. "Separate but equal" doesn't jibe when what people really want is to just be together.

Email is a necessary protocol. It's a fundamental messaging system that it was more pragmatic to open up to an open standard than it was to maintain as a proprietary protocol; companies really had something to lose if they tried to lock their users away from the rest of the world. Comparing the functionality of email to Facebook is, to again use the mundane world example, like comparing sending a letter to somebody versus going to meet them at everyone's favorite hangout. Once again, not a lot in common. While everyone can agree that a basic form of correspondence is a necessity and doesn't necessarily call for a lot of bells and whistles to get the job done, people choose their social scene based on a different set of criteria, where often the more bells and whistles can be offered the better. One of the major drawbacks of open standards is that adding new features can be a long time in coming, and they're often beaten to the punch years ahead by a closed-source solution while the standard is waiting to be finalized (Flash vs. HTML 5, for example).

The problem with fragmentation is that there is little way to communicate between them. If this problem was solved, fragmentation wouldn't be a problem. Yet, open standards meant that email got far more fragmented, but the point is that [this] isn't a problem.

Okay, this part of your response is a bit confusing. At first glance, and second, it almost seems like you're agreeing with me. You're saying that fragmentation wouldn't be a problem if it was solved, which I think we can all agree with. However, you don't offer any solution to solving it. I agree; there are a lot of problems in this world that wouldn't be so bad if only they could be solved. Saying it doesn't make it go away, though.

Also, you're saying that opening up email led to fragmentation, which is my point exactly, so how is this not a problem? (Just an FYI, email hasn't suffered from any major fragmentation issues since the late nineties, so I think it's fair to say that we can let that one go).

"The web doesn't solve the problems we are discussing here.

Yes, I know. That was my point. I'm sorry you missed the subtext there. It doesn't solve the problem we have, and adding yet another protocol to solve the problem is only going to add to the confusion, not alleviate the problem.

What has desktop computing got to do with this?

Okay, that was the sarcasm part; please go back and read it again with the proper inflection. My point was that Linux did nothing to displace the proprietary software platforms out there that it claimed superiority to (and we're talking about platforms here, not software, so the comparison is still valid). I seriously doubt an open standard for social networking is going to be any more successful.

Perhaps this would have been a better analogy if I'd used the obligatory car reference; sorry for having gone outside the box on this one. Better luck next time, huh?

Re:Too late

[EvilBudMan]

It was meant to be a joke. Stupid mods.

Great, open source

[elrous0]

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.

Re:Great, open source

[Spad]

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

Re:Great, open source

[RabbitWho]

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.

Re:Great, open source

[kaiser423]

Huh. Are you on some irc channel of basement dwellers that got caught in a net-split back in the 90's and got stuck in that time period?

You'd make a great find for some anthropologists.

Re:Great, open source

[Magorak]

I agree with you completely.

There's a misconception amongst hardcore OSS folks that everyone in the world likes to "tinker". No, they don't. No they want things to just WORK and when it doesn't, to be able to get answers easily without being chastised and made fun of because of their "inferior" knowledge.

I consider myself a full on geek as I have been surrounded by computers since I was 7 years old (30 years ago). I've programmed in DOS to C to PHP. I've built servers, I've taught classes, I've blah blah blah. I know how to get shit done when it needs done and I don't know everything but I know enough.

I have tried several times over the years to make the switch from Windows and proprietary software to Linux. I love the idea that Linux is open and that there's such a huge community of open source out there. I really want to embrace it.

But every single time I have tried to make the jump, it's been made clear to me what the difference is. Most of the points made in your post are true. Documentation is horrible. Yes, there are a TON of sites on the internet with information and YES there are some sites that are really well done. But how does someone who has NO KNOWLEDGE of these sites find them? Telling me to "google it" is not an answer. How much time should I be spending "searching" for answers.

Most installs I have done have gone off without a hitch, but when something doesn't work, it's hell trying to find an answer. Scouring through message boards and countless other sites trying to get an answer on the simplest questions is not fun. Plus, in many instances, the Linux community comes back with the harshest of answers saying that if I don't know how to recompile my kernel, or don't know how to fix a driver issue, I shouldn't be using Linux in the first place.

These are the reasons that Linux has never and will never become a mainstream desktop OS unless there's a fundamental change in the way the OSS community treats NON-geeks. Regular users. Regular users JUST WANT STUFF TO WORK! They don't care about how it works, or why it works, they just want it to work.

This is why Windows and OS X are so popular. You can whine all you want about power hungry corporations blah blah blah. But the products they produce are easily used by millions worldwide and most of them are dumbass users who have no clue how anything works, and they are content to be that way.

So with all of that said, do you really think it's a good idea to have an OSS version of Facebook where instead of having what FB is now, we have 100 crappy copies of it that are all basically the same thing but with very minute differences? How does that HELP anyone?

Re:Great, open source

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Great, open source

[commodore64_love]

One advantage of Facebook is that it's a central resource where (almost) everybody hangs out. Like Usenet used to be.

If everybody starts putting-up their own OSS variants of Facebook, then the community will fragment - just like what happened to Newsgroups. I used to be able to log in one spot and be done. Now I have to log in 20 different web boards to catch up with the latest news/gossip
.

Re:Great, open source

[timeOday]

Did that save Usenet from being marginalized by proprietary web boards? Look at the iPhone, with a centralized "app store" and a separate app for everything, displacing the idea of interoperable web services accessible from any Internet device. Do we see a network of bazaars where we can put items for sale on web pages using a markup so they are searchable, or one big monolithinc website, ebay? Even email is being marginalized by texting and twitter (which are essentially services, not standards) and gmail (which is still email but centralized on a massive scale and with no need for pop and smtp in many cases, when two users on the same webservice email each other). The vast majority of IP addresses aren't even permitted to originate email any more, being in black holes and/or blocked by the ISP.

Sadly, ALL the momentum is AWAY from shared protocols and interoperation, and towards centralized, smoothly integrated services.

Re:Great, open source

[magellanic]

Your post nothing but thinly-veiled FUD. I can't even tell what point you are trying to make, as your arguments aren't at all analogous to a social network.

An OSS Facebook will have hundreds of competing distros,

There are very few serious distributions that compete for the same niche market.

several dozen kernel forks,

Most distributions commit kernel fixes back to upstream or backport them to older versions.

Countless different versions of the standards that developers will argue over for years

s/argue/collaborate/

horrid UI's

Compared to what?

It's pretty well known that you should never let programmers design user interfaces.

and no documentation

I've used a lot of free software so far, and it's extremely rare that there is no documentation. Just because it's not in your preferred format, doesn't mean it's non-existent.

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.

Despite your example being exaggerated, I've never had to do anything so ridiculous using any free operating system. I'm willing to accept that a minority of applications have less than perfect installation procedures, but fortunately, there is rarely a shortage of alternatives in the free software world -- you can often find something better.

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.

What does a non-geek need to know about kernel versions, distributions etc. to use Ubuntu for their non-geek activities (i.e. web browsing, writing documents and listening to music)? All these activities are possible with the default installs.

Re:Great, open source

[vbraga]

Most installs I have done have gone off without a hitch, but when something doesn't work, it's hell trying to find an answer. Scouring through message boards and countless other sites trying to get an answer on the simplest questions is not fun. Plus, in many instances, the Linux community comes back with the harshest of answers saying that if I don't know how to recompile my kernel, or don't know how to fix a driver issue, I shouldn't be using Linux in the first place.

Funny. Just like you, I tried to migrate from a mostly Windows desktop to Linux. My install borked completely - reasons unknow. But if there was something that surprised me a lot was the willingness of the community to help me. People - on the openSUSE forum and IRC channel - were amazing. Every obscure way to try to get things working was tried - and it finally worked. This myth that the community is harsh or unfriendly is unjustified. If you want to give Linux a try again I suggest you - if you can't find answers on a trivial Google search - to ask on the forums or on IRC. There's a lot of people - myself included - waiting to help.

Re:Great, open source

[IANAAC]

Telling me to "google it" is not an answer.

Why not?

Imagine that I had never used Windows. Where would I go to look for documentation? Microsoft doesn't provide documentation any longer, aside from the context help system. And that's just as bad as any other context help system, be it on a Linux box or on a Mac. Really.

I think you're confusing widespread knowledge from friends or co-workers (or maybe even your own) as documentation.

Sometimes an internet search is exactly what's needed.

Re:Great, open source

[corbettw]

You do realize you're on a forum powered by Open Source software, right? And yet you no trouble posting. So what's your objection again?

Re:Great, open source

[imakemusic]

We already have 100 crappy copies - we've got Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc etc. There is some overlap in functionality but the basis is the same - a profile, a friends list, private and public messages, a "wall" of some form, maybe apps, etc. That's part of the problem.

Instead of this would it not be better to have an invisible (to the user) infrastructure that can connect these together?

Obviously users want things that just work, but people still like a choice and why can't they have a choice of things that just work? Some people like Mac OS, some like Linux and some prefer Windows but no matter which one I choose I can still send an email to someone on a different platform. Similarly some people like Facebook, some like Bebo and some like Myspace (ok that might not be true anymore...myspace really does suck) but you can't log in to myspace and send a message to someone on Facebook.

Re:Great, open source

[natehoy]

It depends on the implementation. Who says you have to join just one network, or use separate interfaces for all the networks you join?

The breakdown of the "central player" always leads to fragmentation, and in some cases incompatibility. We saw it when Netscape was dethroned, then again when Internet Explorer was. We saw it when Microsoft and Yahoo! entered the then-AOL-dominated instant messenger market. We saw it when pop/SMTP took over for proprietary protocols like AOL, because even though message sending became trivial, message formatting is not and it turned ugly (remember IncrediMail? (shudders)). Your own example of the downfall of Newsgroups is an excellent one.

Some remain fragmented. But we invent tools to unify them.

I have to have AOLIM, MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, and GoogleIM accounts to have a hope of staying in touch with everyone I use IM to reach. But I have Pidgin to unify them as if I was only on one IM server.

If social networking went open source, the APIs would be published (there could be a bunch of them, but it doesn't matter). Joining them would be generally free, and the protocols would be fairly well-known.

This means the fine folks who brought us things like GAIM/Pidgin would bring us unified social networking tools that can talk to all of the servers out there.

A friend of yours sets up his social network. You join. Eventually you set up your own, maybe, or convince others to join your friend's. Another friend of you tells you about one that his friend started up, you join that. You find a friend there who says that a bunch of people you know are on this other site. You join that. Kinda like the way LinkedIn works, but with actual separate servers instead of "1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc" connection rankings.

Eventually you've joined a few or hundreds or thousands of disparate social networking sites, but to you they are all one. Your updates go to all of them, and the program aggregates updates from all of them and you see them as a unified whole, just as if it came from a single site. One of your friends who you are connected to via 12 sites sends an update, the unifier "de-duplicates" them and you see them as one update from your friend (probably with a "connected via 12 networks" footer).

When you search, it searches all the networks you have joined. You learn about new networks from your friends, who may have joined different networks in addition to the ones you've shared. Both of you join each other's networks, and the links build.

The beauty of something like this is that, once properly established, no one can ever take it down. As long as you are connected to each of your friends through at least two networks, the loss of a single network in your view does not affect you in the slightest.

Businesses would line up to provide the service for free or low-charge, just so they could insert their own updates into their networks. But the beauty is that, if any one business decided to violate the privacy trust of their customers or overspam their network, the customers could simply drop them from their list of networks.

Plus, of course, lots of other individuals would throw up their own servers. The reliability need not be perfect, especially if there are lots of redundant networks out there.

Of course, that leads to its own problems. Instead of one heavily-watched central server whose privacy policy violations quickly become public record, you'd have thousands of servers of unknown veracity and no really effective watchdog force able to monitor them all.

And traffic could get a tad heavy if you peer to many networks (uploading a 100K picture could get costly if you were peered with 1000 networks), but I'm sure offsite aggregating services would become available (one website where the server handles all the updating of all of your networks) and you could choose to do that if you have a mobile phone or limited account.

Re:Great, open source

[S.O.B.]

I agree that an OSS centralized social networking service like Facebook would likely be a mess. A distributed network like Diaspora would eliminate the problems you pointed out. That is, assuming the interfaces between the nodes are well defined and stable.

I never joined Facebook because I generally don't trust free services. They eventually have to make money and that generally comes from selling their users' information but an open, distributed network allows for free services for those who don't mind trading their information for the service and paid services for those of us who want more privacy.

Re:Great, open source

[StayFrosty]

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.

If I had mod points, I would mod you as a troll. Why? Most of your post is wildly inaccurate and quite irrelevant to the given topic. Since I don't have mod points, I'm going to break this post in to smaller, more digestible chunks for the fun of it.

An OSS Facebook will have hundreds of competing distros

Why would you have a "distribution" of a website? I have yet to see a website that included a bunch of bundled applications to... OK, I forgot about Google but you get the point.

several dozen kernel forks

Kernel forks, really? A website would have several dozen kernel forks? Do you know what a kernel is? Since you compare this hypothetical OSS facebook to Linux, how many forks of the Linux kernel are there? Distributions and kernel devs may apply their own patchset, but I have not seen one case where they actually forked. They always pull from and modify Linus's tree at the next release.

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

More realistically they will be told to go to www.ossfacebookreplacement.com (the name probably will be that crappy though.)

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.

Now, it appears that you are spewing technical-sounding terms in a pathetic attempt to look like you know what the hell you are talking about. Downloading software from an IRC channel? Configuring a router to visit a website? Downloading drivers to visit a website?

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.

To the average, non-geek user, Linux looks like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, or Linux Mint. It just works out of the box and sets sane defaults. If the user is interested he or she can do things like pick a desktop interface. They also come with documentation and an official support forum (Proprietary OS's generally come with neither in my experience.) Other OSS projects look like Firefox, VLC, Chrome, Thunderbird, Songbird, Pidgin and many other OSS projects that non-geeks use every day.

I could see this being modded as funny, but +5 insightful? WTF is wrong with the mods today?

Re:Great, open source

[quanticle]

You're confusing open standards with open source. Take e-mail for example. E-mail is an open standard (or rather, a set of open standards). Anyone is free to make their own e-mail client and make it open or closed source. Outlook and GMail are closed source. Thunderbird and SquirrelMail are open. But an Outlook user can communicate with a Thunderbird user because the protocol is open, even if the particular implementations aren't.

In this case, the proposal is for an open, standardized protocol with regards to social media. This protocol would allow users of different social networking applications to communicate with each other, much as a GMail user can communicate with a Thunderbird user.

Re:Great, open source

[Americano]

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.

The article under discussion literally asks if "Open Source" could render Facebook the next AOL. I'd say "this" is very specifically about open source.

Re:Great, open source

[mcgrew]

An OSS Facebook will have hundreds of competing distros, several dozen kernel forks

Choice is GOOD. Why do you think Howard Johnson's ice cream parlors became so sucessful? Have you ever been in a supermarket trying to decide whether to buy Pepsi, Coke, Dr Pepper, Mt Dew, etc? I take it you'd rather they just offer Coke and you have to be happy with it? And cars; jesus, you have to decide between a sedan, coupe, SUV, minivan, pickup truck... WTF?

horrid UI's

Bullshit. Mandriva's UI is elegant, Windows' UI is a complete and utter mess that you have to relearn with every upgrade. I just bought a netbook with Win 7 on it a few months ago and am just starting to kinda like it; it's taken that long to figure out where they moved everything from XP.

no documentation

I got no documentation with Windows 7, only help files which are seldom any help at all.

then you need to pick a client from this list which you can download from this obscure irc channel

Absolute bullshit. You've never tried any open source anything, have you?

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.

To sign up for a facebook type web page? Are you on crack, or just trolling?

Seriously

[alinuxguruofyore]

Yes, and just like Sendmail prevented Microsoft from a $1 Billion a year messaging platform (Exchange) and Linux prevented Microsoft from a $15 Billion a year Server platform. *yawn* Nothing to see here, please move along.

Re:Seriously

[bsDaemon]

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.

Farmville!

[AntEater]

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.

Re:Farmville!

[OzPeter]

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.

But Farmville *is* an open platform. Anyone can go there and try their hand at farming!

Re:Farmville!

[ZeroExistenZ]

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.

I don't know, I "deactivated" my facebook. And felt disconnected, as all my contacts are integrated on my Android system and everybody is communicating in that fashion. (when I did, people from all over the world started texting asking me wherever I died.)

The "Farmville" and other apps like that are on ignore on my facebook.

The same with holiday pictures: instead of having to show alot of people my pictures, I just dump them on facebook; who cares looks at them (people who were there, family, ...), who doesn't ignores them while it takes me only once a small effort compared to physically have someone sit next to you watching or to setup a dedicated site/album/... with only the pictures to see. (there's a seemingless integration aspect).

So yes, I would hop on the opensource bandwagon as I don't want to be locked into a service which acts questionably with my data. And I'm certain once this is available, there's the possibility to migrate your data through the facebook API and aggregate your content to other services from your opensource driven base.

This discussion has come up quite a few times already: "are we going to decentralize our social activity online" "are we going to opensource it" "can we still trust facebook" "what about privacy? it's all so obscure", "what about security with my data?", ...


When will we see actual implementations? Are they too busy facebooking? In the 90s people made websites from scratch with cats, animated gifs *and* wrote alot of software for the fun of it and the experimentat and not so much being stuck in just the "dreaming up phase" or "plausability analysis".

Re:Farmville!

[AltairDusk]

Sad but probably true, every time I check Facebook I have tons of invites for whatever the new 'ville is that I haven't blocked yet.

Re:Farmville!

[PerfectionLost]

There is an open source social networking platform called Elgg (elgg.org). Feel free to download it, and roll out your own implementation, and invite your friends.

Re:Farmville!

[Arancaytar]

If anything, I'd be glad to be on a social network that wasn't occupied by obsessive browser game addicts. Ideally, they would stay on Facebook forever.

Re:Farmville!

[AntEater]

If anything, I'd be glad to be on a social network that wasn't occupied by obsessive browser game addicts. Ideally, they would stay on Facebook forever.

We call those types of individuals "normal" people. For the remainder of society, there's Slashdot.

Re:Farmville!

[ArsonSmith]

I thought slashdot was a browser game.

ArsonSmith has made a post on Slashville. Do you have moderator points? ArsonSmith would like you to moderate his post up.

Re:Farmville!

[DragonWriter]

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.

Why do you think Google -- who is also beyond a lot of open standards in the social space -- has been reported recently to be in talks with Zynga?

Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[corbettw]

#1 is the biggest hurdle any social networking site has to beat to beat FB at their own game. I recently got back in touch with some old shipmates from the Navy, guys I hadn't spoken to in 20 years who are now on my friends list. Without a central repository of user accounts, there's no way we would've ever gotten back in touch.

Running your own microblogging service is great for businesses and organizations who want to keep their customers/partners/employees in the know about events, and it might even be good for keeping in touch with people you're already in touch with. But so far I haven't seen any realistic ways to find old friends posited. If someone can figure that part out then FB will die the death it deserves.

Re:Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[numbski]

A large step in the right direction would be to search by email address, just like Facebook did/does.

Re:Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[icebraining]

You don't need a central repository, you just need a server-to-server protocol that enables network-wide searches.

See the Kad network, present in emule for several years: it can search for filenames containing a certain string using a DHT, with no central server. And that's hidden from the user: he just types some keywords in a text box, presses search and results appear.
It would be perfectly possible to do a federated network of servers that could talk to each other and provide lists of their users that match your search.

The problem isn't technical.

Re:Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[corbettw]

Then you'd still need a way for those different servers to know about each other. Which still means some kind of central repository.

Although now that I think about it, if each of these servers provided a standard XML file at the same URL (eg, http://example.com/users.xml), then search engines could crawl that file and have their list of who's on what. That might work.

Re:Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[icebraining]

You don't need a central repository! You just need some way to ask a server what other servers he knows.

Then, when a new node wants to join the network, it just needs to know the address of a normal node already in the network; he then connects to him and asks for his known node list, then adds them to his own list and calls them and asks them their known nodes, etc.

Go read about Distributed Hash Tables and Freenet.

Re:Technology isn't Facebook's value per se

[corbettw]

Sounds an awful lot like UUCP. There's a reason that was supplanted by SMTP using MX records (a centralized DB).

This Will be the Year!

[florescent_beige]

2011 will be the year of Lin...no wait. I mean 2011 will be the year of open source social networks on the desk...er, in your browser.

We need peer2peer social networking

[coder111]

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

Re:We need peer2peer social networking

[Meneth]

Diaspora was supposed to do this, but they've been very quiet the last month.

Like AOL? Really?

[nateand]

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.

Re:Like AOL? Really?

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:Like AOL? Really?

[betterunixthanunix]

Actually, most Facebook users don't give a damn about their privacy, and would not switch to another social networking system unless there was some exciting reason for them to. Seriously, I am in a small minority in my social circle when it comes to privacy. I tell people that Facebook records every action they take on the website from the moment they signed up, and people say, "So what?" I tell them that Facebook is engaged in data mining, and that researchers have already published methods of deducing more information than a person thinks they are giving from seemingly insignificant details, and they say, "So what, I have nothing to hide."

Anyone who thinks that privacy is the issue that will cause migration away from Facebook is mistaken. The number of people who left Facebook because of privacy concerns is not even a blip on the radar compared to the number of new users who have signed up for Facebook during the past year.

Something will topple Facebook...

[Fortunato_NC]

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.

Re:Something will topple Facebook...

[operagost]

Books were better scrolls than scrolls.

The technical term for a bound volume is a codex. Both codices and scrolls are books.

Re:Something will topple Facebook...

[bigdaisy]

It is not necessarily because something "better" comes along. It may be entirely sufficient for something "else" to come along. (Allegedly) teenagers using MySpace discovered that their parents had signed up, so they had to go somewhere else to protect their "privacy" and Facebook became the new darling. Now that their parents have signed up to Facebook, the teenagers are probably on the look-out for something else.

Another thing that mitigates the network effect is that these services are not mutually exclusive. A user and a few friends can sign up to a new service and watch it grow while still maintaining a presence in the old service. Perhaps the user will only post the more incriminating pics of their "private" lives on the new service, so that their parents won't see them. Thus, a new exclusive club is started, but a day will come when it is not exclusive enough and users seeking more "privacy" will move on so they can feel special again.

It is hard to argue with TFA that wrapping a few open standards around photo sharing sites, contact lists, e-mail, etc. might be enough to start a revolution--might. With e-mail, for example, we can have traditional mail applications (MUAs), web-mail, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, etc., but they all work together and users can choose whatever combination they want to do their e-mailing. All it takes is some cleverness and we can have a similar profusion of broadly compatible aggregation applications that perform a similar role to Facebook. We can already see this happening with the way Facebook support is being integrated into, for example, MS Outlook and smartphones.

Re:Something will topple Facebook...

[jellomizer]

However Open Source is not a service... It is a licensing model. Now they may make an Open Specification for sharing this information across multiple sites. And that may work for a bit until you get too much crap. Or a new method deals with handling that much crap better.

I am not a big supporter for Open Source. I am though a big supporter of Open Specification. Why? Open Source is focused on the software... In the most part no one really cares about the source code. Often the time it takes for you an analyze the source and do a fix would be less then creating a new solution. Also your changes to the Open Source version will be under public scrutiny, and if it under GNU you loose rights for your changes. In a Utopian world this sounds good and all... However we don't live their, commercial closed source software exists, and they will be maintained and supported and have their niche that open source will not fill in.

Open Source isn't a superset of Open Specification. You can have Open Source but use some odd standard that no one is willing to follow, or just coded in a way that isn't obvious to someone who is basing their code or moving to a different platform. Open Specification gives the end users the tools to make new applications based on the specifications which can be compatible with other tools that follow the same specification as well it allows them to have competitive advantages over others so they can actually make money doing their work, or make it work with different things that may normally have legal problems with say with the GPL, trying to connect to a Patented Subsystem.

Re:Something will topple Facebook...

[Joey Vegetables]

This often works, but not always. NT was not a better UNIX than UNIX, nor IIS a better Apache than Apache, nor is any forum software even remotely comparable to NNTP, yet in each case the former gained significant inroads against the latter. In my view, each of these abominations arose due to government interference in markets - in the former two cases by protecting Microsoft from prosecution for fraud, and in the latter case, a genuine and well-deserved fear of truly open and anonymous communication, for which NNTP was and is a nearly ideal vehicle.

This will likely happen...

[Max Romantschuk]

The future might well be open social networks, but it will take a lot of time. There are huge challenges ahead, given the amount of data that has to be aggregated and displayed. Facebook does some very clever stuff to aggregate all those status updates, comments, images, etc. into your news feed. Doing this across the Internet instead of in a data centre will require a lot more bandwidth and less latency than we currently have.

I'm sure a lot of people here on Slashdot are happy to bash Facebook, but it can be a quite powerful social tool. Especially for keeping track of upcoming (IRL) events that you might be interested in it works quite well. (Why manually monitor the websites of a bunch of clubs when I can just join their Group on Facebook and get event invites automativally?) You can also filter out all the stupid games from the news feed. I barely remember that Farmwille exists anymore. ;)

My point is that it will take a lot of progress before a decentralized architecture can match what Facebook can do now. It's doable, but it certainly ain't trivial.

Re:This will likely happen...

[icebraining]

Especially for keeping track of upcoming (IRL) events that you might be interested in it works quite well. (Why manually monitor the websites of a bunch of clubs when I can just join their Group on Facebook and get event invites automativally?)

I use RSS for that - it's open and distributed.

For example, see Last.fm event recommendations; I also get new movie openings using from Sapo Cinema (a national website).

e-bay

[WindBourne]

you have the same issue that competitors to e-bay have; Name,

Re:Just a thought

[c0d3g33k]

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.

Makes sense

[MonsterTrimble]

I honestly think I could work pretty well. Basically a distributed client side setup with the big things that facebook does and (for the most part) does well: Share stuff with people you know - statuses, comments, messages, photos. Build something like a Pidgin/Yahoo messenger client which can pull status & wall feeds from friends who are online and from common friends who have updated information on friends who are not online. For photo sharing, have an interface with one of the big photo sites (or all of them) for photos.

Re:Makes sense

[bsDaemon]

"back in the day," aka the mid-to-late 90s, I managed just fine to keep track of contacts on ICQ and later moving to AIM, plus the people I knew in various IRC channels on a couple of different servers, though I mostly hung out on EFNet. Most of the IRC people and about half the ICQ people, I had never met in person and never did. All the AIM people where from school. Different "friend circles" didn't know, or need to know, about each other in 90% of cases. Email was completely separate. If I wanted to give information to one group of people, but not others, that was incredibly easy.

When FB was for .EDUs only, it was fairly useful for me, but now its really not. It's actually down-right creepy. Maybe I'm just not hip enough, with my choosing Perl over Ruby and my none-smartphone that actually makes calls, but I'm not sure that an "open source social network" would actually end up being any better than Facebook is now. I skunked by FB data over the course of time, slowly started removing fields, and then ultimately did the account delete about a week or so ago. If people want to contact me, they can get me on IM, via Email, or just friggin' call me. People I don't want to know certain things never find out, and I don't have to worry about bullshit.

Personally, I'm not sure it matters what the mechanism for the 'social network' is, or who controls the mechanism. Who is going to guarantee that an "open source" social network is going to be any better for my privacy or security? I don't think they can. I'd just be another thing to waste time on and cause problems. I can still keep in contact with everyone who matters without the facebook or myspace or other bullshit and am of the opinion that if someone won't answer the phone when you call or send an sms, they probably aren't your friend anyway, no matter how many status updates they "like" when they mindlessly go through clicking "like" on everything that pops up while they're trying not to pay attention in class or life.

Re:Makes sense

[icebraining]

Why do you think FB is less private than AIM or ICQ? It all passes through their servers.

A federated alternative could let you run your own server, that would talk to your friend's servers transparently, and it would only send each server the messages you had sent to the people who had accounts there.

You know, like email.

Re:Makes sense

[bsDaemon]

AIM and ICQ aren't any more secure in that I don't have control over the server. However, its more private in that the content of my communication is not routinely broadcast to the rest of my contacts, whether they were a participant or not.

FB Disks?

[spyingwind]

So I can get a Facebook Official diskette/CD?

Re:FB Disks?

[Ash-Fox]

So I can get a Facebook Official diskette/CD?

No, you get a book instead.

Maybe Social Media will change

[Pete Venkman]

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.

Re:Maybe Social Media will change

[nyctopterus]

Yes, how dare people presume other people care about them? The presumptuousness is preposterous!

You know, you're perfectly welcome not to use any social media sites. Lots of people like sharing trivialities with their friends, clearly. I'd go so far as to say that's mostly what having friends is about, as opposed to colleagues.

Re:Just a thought

[natehoy]

I'm confused. Facebook is a commercial site. You joined, they give you free service, they get paid for ads. Enough people join, they make more money.

What do you think would be "fair" about them paying you money to use the site? Conversely, what do you think is "unfair" about them not paying you for something they've never, ever mentioned a single word about paying anyone to do?

"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian."
  - Dennis Wholey

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.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[fermion]

A generation was introduced to the online world through AOL. As young people were introduced to the web, the relevance of AOL went away, and it failed. Now young people are introduced to the web through services like Facebook. If this continues, through groups of young people, it won't matter that they migrate away as they become more sophisticated. There will always be a new group of young people who want to feel popular.

The primary danger to Facebook is that something simler comes along. The attractiveness of Facebook is not only the social content, but also the ability to generate and, more importantly, consume content. The secondary danger is that Facebook is not able to monitize content. Data for children is not so valuable. Data for 25-40 is. So the issue will be to have a sizable number of post college people, who are worried about their careers, continue to use the service.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[oodaloop]

It will eventually be replaced not by one single thing but by a variety of better things, including actual human-to-human interaction.

How, by teleporting me to see my friends all over the world? If you could teleport me across the internet, I wouldn't be using the technology to idly chat with relatives and old class-mates, if you catch my drift. I'd use it go get a Monster drink everytime I need one. Like right now. Oh sweet blue Monster, how I miss you.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[aBaldrich]

I put my hopes in diaspora.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[Ash-Fox]

My human-to-human interaction is greatly facilitated by Facebook. I can keep track of more friends at a time, easily organize events, and I know that most likely they'll have an email notification for all these things.

I do the same thing with my account on a server running Zimbra opensource edition. I don't need Facebook to do that.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[BitZtream]

Theres a Coleman camping gear commercial that shows a family out camping with the title of something like:

Coleman - The original social networking.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[DeadDecoy]

Would it be sufficient to teleport a 3d image of yourself and vice-versa? Yes, I know the tech is expensive, but it's there and will probably get cheaper and portable eventually.

Re:Render Facebook Obsolete?

[Ash-Fox]

I don't see responding to the previous comment as off topic.

Great, open standards

[mdwh2]

Throwing insults at open source gets you +5 on Slashdot - I'd never thought I'd see the day.

If you want an example of an open source social networking site, take a look at Livejournal. Are you seriously telling me that the closed source Facebook is a better website than Livejournal? The UI is far better than Facebook, it's easy to use and doesn't have bugs, plenty of documentation, and was doing all this long before Facebook.

Aside from your comments being false (I use Windows personally, but I tried Ubuntu recently and found it worked and looked just fine; I didn't even need documenation), you're missing the point. This is more about open standards than open source as such. If you bother to RTFA:

Just like open standards for e-mail and the Web broke users free from proprietary closed networks of the early 1990s, so too could a new set of standards allow people to share their thoughts, photos and comments across the Internet, regardless of what social networking services they use

It's clear that it's more about open standards, than necessarily open source alternatives. If there were open standards, yes there'd be a load more "Facebooks", but closed source sites would still be free to make use of them - just as we have closed source email clients. So even if you believed that giving away source somehow made an application terrible, you'd still be okay.

I take it you must absolutely hate email then, because that's based on open standards like SMTP? Obviously all email clients must have terrible UIs, no documentation, and be a pain to install, by your logic...

Re:Great, open standards

[commodore64_love]

LiveJournal is going downhill fast (annoying popup ads for example), and most of my friends have stopped posting there since moving to facebook.

As for the guy's other comments I agree that Linux is a confusing mish-mash:
- Should I use GNU, Ubuntu, Puppy, or some other variant?
I picked Ubuntu:
- Now do I use Gubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, or some other confusing mishmash of first letters?
- And what is this Lucid Lynx and Intrepid Ibex and other weird names everyone keeps talking about?

Since I'm a geek I plowed through this nonsense and found the answers. But your average person would just roll his/her eyes, say "Forget it", and go buy a $2000 Windows laptop at Best Buy because it's easier and doesn't require thinking or learning nerd-speak. People like my brother who would rather spend $70/month to have a Comcast technician install his television, rather than do the setup himself and get TV for free (via antenna). He's the type to walk in a store and just buy the first Windows machine he see, rather than mess with learning Linux.

Re:Great, open standards

[betterunixthanunix]

"Linux" is not an operate system; most of the confusion people have stems from the idea that "Linux" is a single operating system that has fractured. If we instead refer to individual distros as operating systems, which is far more accurate, we are left with this situation: people have to choose "flavors" of a distro. That is not so bad, considering that they wind up having to do the same with Windows (Home, Premium, Professional, Ultimate...). I have install Fedora on computers that are used by people with a range of technical proficiency, from my mother who has very little technical knowledge to a person in my research group, who only needed me around to help figure out why some obscure hardware was misbehaving. Even for people with little to no technical skill, "learning Linux" amounted to about 10 minutes of getting used to GNOME and seeing where the Firefox icon is located.

The days of needing significant technical skill to boot up GNU/Linux (for lack of a better term) are long gone. There is still a bit of a reputation, but when people see what GNOME looks like, the usual reaction I get is, "Well that doesn't look so bad."

Re:Great, open standards

[VGPowerlord]

That is not so bad, considering that they wind up having to do the same with Windows (Home, Premium, Professional, Ultimate...).

Really? I bet if I walk into a retail store, all the new computers in it have Windows 7 Home Premium.

Re:Great, open standards

[betterunixthanunix]

So? I bet if you interview 100 Ubuntu users, 95 of them will be using the plain, default version of Ubuntu that is prominently displayed on the Ubuntu webpage. As for "Well there are all these versions, Lucid Lynx, Hardy Heron," Apple does not seem to have any issues with naming Mac OS X versions after animals.

Re:Great, open standards

[icebraining]

Write "ubuntu" in Google. Click "download ubuntu". Click "start download". Burn ISO image to CD. Reboot.

Re:Great, open standards

[westlake]

People like my brother who would rather spend $70/month to have a Comcast technician install his television, rather than do the setup himself and get TV for free (via antenna)

The antenna - done right - implies climbing to the peak of your roof. UHF reception - three to five strong signals. Maybe. Unless you willing to spend some serious time and money on a project like this, you are going to be disappointed.

Re:Great, open standards

[mcgrew]

Throwing insults at open source gets you +5 on Slashdot - I'd never thought I'd see the day.

Must be a slow day at Microsoft and the employees all have mod points.

I tried Ubuntu recently and found it worked and looked just fine; I didn't even need documenation

Same here with Mandrake/Mandriva over five years ago. Installation of the OS and its assorted apps took all of half an hour (most of which was changing CDs; the apps come with the OS), as opposed to two or three hours installing Windows and its assorted apps. Mandriva was all point and click, and things were laid out in a logical manner that made sense and made everything easy.

The GP has obviously never used any open source software in the last ten years, or tried only one which happened to be one of the worst. Or is just trolling.

Re:Great, open standards

[mdwh2]

LiveJournal is going downhill fast (annoying popup ads for example), and most of my friends have stopped posting there since moving to facebook.

Well I know that Facebook is much more popular than Livejournal, clearly - but I mean, it's foolish for the OP to say that anything open source is rubbish. From a technical point of view Livejournal is a perfectly good engine for blogging and social networking, and my feeling is that Facebook's better success is due to other reasons (consider, Myspace was more popular than Livejournal too, but would anyone say that the website/engine was better?)

Should I use GNU, Ubuntu, Puppy, or some other variant?

Use what you like. What about closed source - do I use Windows, OS X, or some other variant?

Now do I use Gubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, or some other confusing mishmash of first letters?

I just used Ubuntu, the standard version. Unlike Windows, where you have to choose between Starter, Basic, Home, Professional, Ultimate.

But your average person would just roll his/her eyes, say "Forget it", and go buy a $2000 Windows laptop at Best Buy because it's easier and doesn't require thinking or learning nerd-speak.

The different variants of closed source operating systems don't put people off; and the "average person" gets the OS already on the computer.

Not that any of this Linux talk has anything to do with social networking, or open source in general.

People like my brother who would rather spend $70/month to have a Comcast technician install his television, rather than do the setup himself and get TV for free (via antenna). He's the type to walk in a store and just buy the first Windows machine he see, rather than mess with learning Linux.

What "setup" or "mess" with Linux? Personally I'm still a Windows fan, but having tried Ubuntu I fail to see what the problem is. Yes, it's true that most people would buy a computer rather than install an operating system separately, but that's not a Windows versus Linux issue.

Re:Great, open standards

[mdwh2]

If you're walking into a store, you don't have to choose the OS - same would apply to Linux. They'll just get the standard version already installed.

(And actually, you're wrong - most netbooks seem to come with Starter, so that's at least two versions.)

For those getting their operating system separately, you do have to choose which Windows version you want - also having to factor in how much you want to spend (and a wrong decision can be expensive). No problem with Ubuntu - just download the one standard version, and if I want to seek out one of these special variants (I had no idea they even exists, that's how "confusing" it isn't), I'm free to do so in future.

Could Open Source Render Facebook the Next AOL?

[Carik]

No, assuming you mean "could open source shut down Facebook". But a really good open source application could. So could a really good closed source application.

See, outside a relatively small community of OSS fans, no one really cares whether their software is open source or not. What they want to know is, "Does this software do what I want, is it easy to use, and is it cheaper than the alternatives?" Note the order -- it's important. If if doesn't do what they want, ease of use doesn't matter. If it doesn't do what they want and something else is easier to use, cost doesn't matter. And nowhere on that list is "Does the coding style match my personal ideology regarding freedom and politics." People just don't care.

If you want to have open source software take over the computer world, make it better than closed source software, and make it easier to use. And when you go to advertise it, push those two aspects. Tell people how great it is, how fast it is, how simple it is, how powerful it is. Tell them you can sell it for 2/3 the price of the software they've been using. Tell them all their old files will translate across with no problems. They'll be thrilled. The minute you start talking about freedom, they're going to stop listening.

Re:Exactly

[mdwh2]

You admit that the closed source Facebook is awful, and then conclude that's an argument against Open Source? Let me know how it compares to open source sites like Livejournal...

(Apologies if this was your point and you were being sarcastic...)

You Betcha!

[assertation]

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.

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.

Yes, please.

[rhythmx]

Pretty please?

Comparisons aside...

[IANAAC]

Are you seriously telling me that the closed source Facebook is a better website than Livejournal?

Comparisons aside...

I thought I read not too long ago that Facebook is, in fact, built on open source (LAMP, among other things).

True, all the stupid games are Flash-based, but that's not really Facebook.

What is closed source at Facebook? I'm honestly interested.

Re:Comparisons aside...

[mdwh2]

That is an interesting point, for the OP moaning about how terrible open source software is :)

What is closed source at Facebook?

But do you mean it's built using open source tools, or can I actually download the Facebook server code, and then set up a separate website that works just like Facebook? (The latter is what can be done with Livejournal, and indeed there are several alternative sites using the code.)

Re:Comparisons aside...

[IANAAC]

But do you mean it's built using open source tools, or can I actually download the Facebook server code, and then set up a separate website that works just like Facebook?

Obviously you can't download it, then run the same code elsewhere. This is no different than many, many other open source projects out on the web.

My point really was that calling Facebook closed source is not really accurate.

Re:Comparisons aside...

[betterunixthanunix]

What is closed source at Facebook?

"Closed source" is the wrong term to use here. Facebook is a proprietary social networking and communication system, because of the following (not exhaustive, just what stands out to me):

1. To interact with a Facebook user, you yourself must be a Facebook user; any attempt to automate to circumvent this requirement results in an immediate ban for TOS violations (compare to email, in which users of one system can easily communicate with users of another system).
2. A Facebook user is forced to deal with whatever changes Facebook pushes on them. There are no options for rolling back to earlier versions, or for taking some new features and not others. While this is true of any web app (you are at the webmaster's mercy), it is important to remember that this is nothing more than an interface change; if users were allowed to use some other service or perhaps a desktop program to access Facebook, they could be free of unwanted changes.
3. You are not allowed to add your own features to Facebook; again, this is typical with web apps, and again, this goes back to the thorough lack of interoperability with any other system.

To put it another way, it is entirely possible to create proprietary software using GCC; people do it all the time.

Re:Comparisons aside...

[quanticle]

The only thing closed-source at Facebook is their caching and optimization code that allows them to grow to hundreds of millions of users whilst maintaining a high level of responsiveness and throughput. I heard that they have something like a 99% hit rate on their caches.

Re:Comparisons aside...

[icebraining]

http://www.opensource.org/osd.html

Re:Comparisons aside...

[mdwh2]

Obviously you can't download it, then run the same code elsewhere. This is no different than many, many other open source projects out on the web.

Such as?

key word is easy

[snooo53]

I think you've hit on the right features Facebook provides, but the key word here in all of them is "EASY". That is the biggest hurdle for open source... providing an easy end user experience. That, and attracting developers.

Re:Please, please let this happen.

[assertation]

If he is familiar with the concept of a bank account, he will not be poor. However, it will be fun to see that smug and arrogant look get wiped off of his face as his the number of his users dwindle.

Yes, it could.

[HeckRuler]

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.

Re:Yes, it could.

[StripedCow]

And google (and/or other search engines) could implement the functionality of compiling a nice overview of what your friends are up to (in semi real time).

Re:Yes, it could.

[prostoalex]

How do you generate News Feed that's interesting and not just a collection of useless facts?

Re:Yes, it could.

[HeckRuler]

Well no, as it stands, google wouldn't have access to that without the whole "network of trust" thing, because google isn't friends with everyone. Presumably they could add something to access your network, but that can't really be part of the plan. That all assumes that your pics, activities, statuses, and whatnot are restricted only to friends, which since you own it, you have actual control. Actual control being different then the illusion of control until we change the terms of service and crack you wide open sort.

Re:Yes, it could.

[HeckRuler]

Wait, face book's "news feed" wasn't useless facts?

You obviously haven't been looking at the trends

[hellfire]

Since the internet hit the mainstream, the trend has been to have less human-to-human interaction. It started with things like IRC, USENet, and email, and has expanded to Web-based forums, blogs, comments on the bottom of news websites, and Facebook. Human to Human interaction is messy. Humans are dumb, annoying, selfish, greedy, and lazy. But on Facebook, humans are reduced to some cute pictures and a periodic status. One can communicate light heartedly with your "friends" simply by replying to comments or posting your own and look for comments. It's not as real, but it filters out all the hassle of having to make plans, go outside, and deal with other people you don't want to deal with, like your friend's significant other or relatives.

"Better" is relative. Human to human contact is to Facebook as good restaurants are to McDonalds. You have to invest time looking into restaurants and risk bad or mediocre restaurants in order to find the good ones or even the best one. McD's is unhealthy and boring, but to the untrained pallete it still takes just fine, it feeds your hunger, and it's incredibly easy to get because it's the same at every single chain. When I was a kid, McDonalds was great. Now that I've grown up, I have figured out there are better foods out there, both better tasting and better for you.

Maybe more of your friends spend less time on facebook, but I know a ton of people who are still on there, and new people are being added daily, in the form of teens who want to be part of the trend.

Oh and before you point out that there's a trend in schools and families to wean kids off fast food and the like because it's bad for you in general, there's no such movement for facebook yet. Only parents yelling at their kids to get off the computer, and kids never listen until you pull the plug and force them to go outside and password protect the computer.

This would be great, but what about spam?

[Optic7]

It would be great to have an open-source, open-standards, distributed social-networking system to replace Facebook. Except that when you mention SMTP, I shudder to think of all the spam that such a system would make possible. I get zero spam at facebook right now, so I can see why some people seem to prefer to communicate through facebook than through email now.

I hope that this new concept would be engineered from the ground up to never allow spam, but that seems like a tough thing to do without an absolute central authority.

Re:This would be great, but what about spam?

[paimin]

Really? I got almost nothing but spam from Facebook, which is why I signed off. The whole thing seems like one big socially-engineered spam virus to me. The ratio of real human communication to spam from some applet or group is like 1 to 10.

Re:This would be great, but what about spam?

[DragonWriter]

It would be great to have an open-source, open-standards, distributed social-networking system to replace Facebook. Except that when you mention SMTP, I shudder to think of all the spam that such a system would make possible.

Believe it or not, people building communications standards since the development of SMTP have noticed the problem of spam in email, and spam-prevention has often been a central feature of newer communications standards. XMPP, AMQP, and all kinds of other post-SMTP messaging protocols all have features designed to prevent spam (and often have spam prevention as an explicit part of their charter.)

Re:This would be great, but what about spam?

[Optic7]

I'm talking about the private messages, not the "wall" feature on facebook. Even that is controllable though, you can just leave, remove, or "unlike" groups, apps and people who are sending you updates that you don't like. Or you can just hide them permanently. Very different from email spam.

Re:This would be great, but what about spam?

[Optic7]

I would figure that they would have planned for it, with spam being so prevalent in almost every internet communication system. But are the measures that they have come up with really effective?

Re:This would be great, but what about spam?

[DragonWriter]

I would figure that they would have planned for it, with spam being so prevalent in almost every internet communication system. But are the measures that they have come up with really effective?

Well, the common social networking and instant messaging technique of using a whitelist where the only message you can get to someone who hasn't cleared you to communicate with them is a request to be added to their whitelist works pretty darned well.

Re:This would be great, but what about spam?

[Optic7]

True. Thanks for the example!

Now How About an Open Source Replacement for eBay?

[Anonymous Coward]

So when's the OS community going to tackle eBay? With all the dissatisfaction voiced about eBay, I haven't seen any viable OS threats. Am I missing something?

Facebook isn't about the technology

[dingen]

Facebook could be made completely open and still be the only really valuable social networking site out there. Because FB isn't about the technology at all, it's about the database. Only FB has the most users, therefore the highest chance you'll be able to find your friends on it. And there is no way FB will share that data, even when using open protocols.

Even when open standards are realised for poking, wall-writing, liking etc. who will store the userdata to make these functions of any value?

The "Walled Garden" Argument Is Getting Old

[Revotron]

A lot of people don't use anything else but Facebook. A vast majority of the people I know and want to connect with are on Facebook because it's easier for them and everybody they know is on it, as well. It's an endless cycle.

Why would I give up living in a walled garden just to venture out into a vast desert?

Facebook is all about the contacts

[jmyers]

Relating Facebook to its features and applications and how they could be replaced is missing the point. Facebook is all about the contact list. People will not move away from it and lose their contacts and seamless communication. i.e. importing the contacts somewhere else just adds complexity.

Like all things FB will eventually die but it will take some killer app that no one has seen yet, not just duplication of features.

Another way it may die is through a really bad event like major identity theft or a really nasty virus that causes people to flock away from it. Or possibly a bad DDOS attack that brings it down for an extended period.

Re:Exactly

[natehoy]

the back end of Facebook

His name is Mark Zuckerberg. And this isn't a family site, you don't need to use euphemisms. Calling him an asshole is OK.

things that suck about facebook

[blackest_k]

Some problems with facebook which I am sure most people have is the inability to separate contacts into at least 3 categories friends family and workmates is the very least that most people want to some degree.

Another issue is more control over friends of friends. If I want to keep privacy to our shared friends only then that should be possible. I shouldn't be getting updates of friends, friends.

Streamline the games Farmville is quite like the sims but with no AI sure your friends can play your neighbors but why not select a number of plots and choose a crop to sow. sure offer automatic harvesting at stupid o'clock when the crop is ready people might be willing to pay for that.

so with that plus the option of bring all your facebook friends with you.
maybe even share stuff from facespace or whatever you call it and paste it to your old facebook account. Selectively bring in notifications from facebook , ie no game updates for example.

make it a smooth transition and people may barely notice they left.

Privacy? Oh noes!!

[Alarindris]

The only 'privacy' you lose is some piddly demographic data.

No one cares about you. You're not that important.

Re:Privacy? Oh noes!!

[Spad]

Importance is irrelevant when you can automate all your datamining, phishing and spamming.

I agree and disagree with the assumption

[prefec2]

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.

If you want to replace Facebook...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Zynga owns Farmville

[Infonaut]

It doesn't have to get ported to an open platform to hurt Facebook. It just has to be ported to any other platform, which is already happening.

Facebook use trends

[Infonaut]

You say that people are spending less time on Facebook than before, but whether that's a long-term trend is still unclear.

As for it being replaced by human-to-human interaction, your desire to see that happen is unrelated to whether it actually will occur.

Those hurdles aren't that high

[telekon]

In fact, all of those are being addressed in an open source, open standard, open protocol distirbuted social networking platform currently in early beta:

The Appleseed Project

You can already download the source, put it on your webserver, and connect to the rest of the appleseed network. It's not ready for prime time, but the potential is definitely there.

I think Facebook will be around for a while, but the writing's on the wall: "You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting."

ProprietARy

[HTH NE1]

He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services,

Spelling checkers only catch when you misspell a word; they won't catch when you use the wrong word spelled correctly.

I disagree

[MikeRT]

This is how the general public tends to see it:

Walled gardens are safer than open spaces.
Facebook is a walled garden.
Open Source Project X is an open space.
Facebook is safer for my children than Project X.

As I said, it's about perception. There's stopping someone from signing up as "Barry Obama" from the Great State of Kenya, devout Islamic family man.

Isn't that exactly what Android

[kaapstorm]

contacts list does? Or is my phone a "destination", not a source?

Misguided?

[lymond01]

Did that headline make sense? AOL was a portal application with easy dial-up back in the day (and might still be) -- it was an application that ran on your computer that gave you access to various pieces of information stored on a server -- sort of like the internet today, but all on AOL's servers. Companies and news sites would put their wares on AOLs servers and you could access them through menus or keywords. There was an email system as well for AOL users.

But then the www exploded like the big bang and people found that you didn't need AOL installed to access all these fancy places -- and in fact there were more places to go to outside of AOL.

What's different now is that the "portal applications" are just websites instead of programs. SMTP hasn't changed anything in terms of how AOL was used other than make lots of little (or big) versions of the same thing on the web. Microsoft, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, etc -- aggregators of services. If you're going to say some open standard is going to change Facebook, that's not quite right. You might end up getting more than one Facebook (like there's more than one email system) that all use standards -- and someone might write an app that ties them altogether with a single sign-on so it doesn't matter which you technically belong to, your login works for all sites in terms of communication, even if you don't have a profile.

But a "new system" would just be another AOL, another Facebook, etc. Someone has to run it.

Re:Just a thought

[c0d3g33k]

You're still not making a cogent argument. If you know about the acronym, what problem do you have with my use of it exactly? It concisely summarizes an important concept: Nothing is free - ultimately there will be a cost, even if not a financial one.

"WTF is wrong with you?" doesn't really communicate a point worth discussing. "Retarded" doesn't make much of a point either. I don't frequent 4chan, but your posts seem to be a better fit for that venue than mine.

For the last time:

What exactly do you find objectionable about the concept that recieving a service at no cost to you does not entitle you to compensation, but might have costs you did not anticipate? I'd really like to hear a good argument to that point.

Do. You. Have. A. Point. You. Would. Like. To. Make?

If not, go away. You're bothering me, kid. Leave the grownups alone and go play with your toys.