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Could Open Source Render Facebook the Next AOL?
joabj writes "Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook's photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn't work better as Internet-wide standardized services. At the OSCON conference last week, the head of Identi.ca, an open source Twitter-like microblogging service, likened today's social networking services to the enormously proprietary online services of the early 1990s, like AOL or Prodigy. He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services, so too could open source social networking stacks, like OStatus, render walled garden services like Facebook obsolete."
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.
Except that all that will need to be done by the people hosting the services, not the users using them.
Unless they can get Farmville ported to an open platform most facebook users will never leave no matter hope open or technically superior an alternative is.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
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.
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.
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. ...and so on...
MySpace was a better Friendster than Friendster.
Friendster was a better Classmates.com than Classmates.com.
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.
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No, Facebook will render Facebook obsolete. A lot of people are spending less time on their now than they did before. The novelty is wearing off, and eventually people won't care about it at all. It will eventually be replaced not by one single thing but by a variety of better things, including actual human-to-human interaction.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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...
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.
Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.
I never said to use the Facebook API.
... it would probably be a tree directory with a bunch of XML files and images. Maybe they want to put that into Diaspora and I would have a way that the system would autopopulate their diaspora with this archived data? Maybe they want to do their own thing with it? Maybe I could spend time doing this for Facebook and MySpace and Friendster and whatever you send me a link to?
;) No API ToS violations needed.
For a mental exercise let's imagine (and really maybe Perl is the better choice here) that I made a Ruby gem called SocialWalker or something of the sort and basically I used mechanize to log into Facebook after getting the user's credentials. Then the application connects to my webservice that sends the latest selector strings (harvested from the latest Facebook interface by hand with SelectorGadget) and also Nokogiri to quickly scrape off all the information and date/time stamps. I think the pictures would be a different kind of effort but completely feasible.
At that point, the user could save it in some documented open social file format that any application can read
Yeah, I might not be able to spider your posts on your friends walls and maybe I won't be able to get some information and maybe the new system won't let you back timestamp things so that data has to be put in the comments on your new photo albums.
Maybe Google could be petitioned to create this system instead of some developer who prefers to get drunk on the weekends instead of liberating social network users? Google is the god of scraping and caching after all.
But it would look like nothing more than one user looking at all their history one last time
My work here is dung.