Slashdot Mirror
Dealing With the Eventual Collapse of Social Networks
taskforce writes "There are good reasons to think web services like Facebook won't be around forever. If Facebook ever were to go down there would be potentially huge costs to its users. We can all take individual steps to protect our data and social network, but is there anything we can do to our economy to mitigate the costs of the failure of these services? The Red Rock looks at the role open source, open standards, consumer cooperatives, and enterprise reform can play. The author concludes that all is not lost, and that there's a lot we can do to reduce both the cost and frequency of failure."
His suggestions are pretty radical: "The first is draw up an Open Data Bill and pass it into law. This would (where applicable) mandate the use of open standards by firms, and also mandate that all data held about a user is downloadable by that user, in an open standard. ... The second is to reform the corporate structure of larger companies to include some directors elected by consumers, rather than just shareholders. Not all the directors, like in the Cooperative Group, and not even a majority, but just a small portion of the board — say one third."
You should treat every website like it might not be around forever.
If you store your photo's on facebook and don't have backups if it elsewhere, then you deserve what you get, if Facebook closes down.
Nice idea to have an "Open Standard" to get our data, but I don't see this happening.
Be seeing you...
Somehow Facebook is too big to fail, but MySpace can flitter off into the night without people caring? When we finally approach the end of the natural life of Facebook, people will transition into whatever the next big social media gathering site will be, little by little until Site A is empty and Site B is the new hot stuff. It's not going to happen overnight, no "rush to the exit", and definitely no need to legislate a "fix".
don't upload everything to a "service" without having a backup, if it really means anything to you...
Anything I put on a social network, I consider it "lost". I treat it like conversation. Growing up, there was never any expectation that my conversations would be archived. I treat social networks like that. Yep, Slashdot postings too. Once in a while I'll get some +5 that I think is worth saving, but even most of those aren't worth it. Even the several blogs or sites I've had over the years don't hold up very well over time.
Let's face it. Most of us aren't Shakespeare. Most of us have pretty boring lives. How do you know if you *do* have an interesting life? Somebody else starts a page for you. So that solves the problem right there. Just do nothing on social networks, and let somebody without a life do it for you.
Now, all of this is a separate issue from being able to "back down" your data. I have to admit I haven't done that with my Flickr pix. It's my one weakness. I really need to at least download the pix and burn them all one one CD. I have the raw data, but the selection of what was "post worthy" and the comments and metadata are the real problem. I'll take care of it one day, or my unremarkable life will end before somebody does it for me.
And now, to drive the point home, I'll post this AC instead of using my Karma +2 bonus account that I've had for 10 years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This goes for all social networks (including Slashdot) but I will use Facebook as an example:
You do not have a FaceBook page.
No you don't.
Facebook has a page on you, which you update for them for free. You are a product that Facebook produces for its customers. The customers of Facebook are the advertisers, not you. This is not necessarily a bad deal for you. You get to show people Facebook's page about you, and derive pleasure from interacting with Facebook's pages about your friends. All for free.
But don't get upset when Facebook decides to improve things for its customers, because they can (and should) put them first. Facebook owes you nothing.
Regulating social networks seems like an exercise in frustration. What counts as a social network? Does my blog count? Do I need to let users download all their comments in an "industry standard format"? Do MMO's count? Can I download my +5 firesword?
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
You've got a point, but that's a gross exaggeration. What did the 20th century give us? Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynman, Vonnegut... between them, dozens of books worth preserving, and that's just a tiny selection of major 20th century authors. It might be argued that the number will diminish over time (Feynman's physics lectures might not always be so great in light of newer work, after all, and god knows not all of Vonnegut's work is worth a damn) but it'll take a very long time for it to reach two.
Hell, there are centuries BCE that I think most scholars would say have more than two books worth preserving.
If Facebook goes the way Myspace is heading, then the biggest risk is they'll sell your every private data to ChoicePoint, the NSA, and everyone else who fancies taking a look. They can't commercialize it now because people would leave the site, (at least not openly, but if those wiretap memos going around are true, secretly they already are). But once the company has no future and can openly piss off its users, then it becomes not problem selling that to every data mining company out there.
The problem with your suggestion is that often the data you want to preserve was created or discovered within the service, not externally. For instance, your Facebook friends lists, and the messages you've exchanged with people on Facebook, were probably created directly in Facebook, not exported from your home computer, unlike your photographs which you probably created and then uploaded. But even then, the captions for your photographs may well have been created directly in Facebook or Flickr, while your PC or phone thinks of them only as IMG00345.jpg.
So you need some way to back up your data from services that may not have been built for it. With Gmail, you can use IMAP to copy it down to your PC - does Facebook have anything better than screen captures available?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
as people I know started to sign up and use social sites more and more I stared getting less and less calls from them. Now I only get calls from a few of them. Don't get me wrong its not a bad thing as it lets me know who my real friends are.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Facebook, maybe (but no, not really).
Google? Anyone claiming they can be replaced in 5 years just has NO idea how much work it really was to get to where they are today. The fact that it's trivially simple to search for something on Google and find decent results in 100ms does NOT MEAN it's a trivially simple thing to implement. It means they have spent an insane amount of time and money to make it trivially simple to use.
There are a LOT of search engines that failed over the years... but why? Because Google was so much better there was no reason to use them. Until someone makes something better, I don't think they are in any danger of irrelevance...
Let's avoid worrying about the collapse of social network sites by not using them to begin with.
No, really. Stop uploading everything to a third-party company so they can data-mine it and make it hard for you to get any of it back if their business plan fails. You want a presence on the Net? Run a blog on your own website. You can even pick the domain you really want to hand out then. People can leave comments, subscribe with RSS, communicate with you via this fabulous standard called email. Web hosting is cheap. You can add advertising to help pay the bill for it, no different than an ad-filled experience at existing social networks now is it? Still too expensive? Well social networks and blogs aren't a necessity of life, they're recreational things -- hobbies. Hobbies cost money, ask anyone who does model trains, remote control airplanes, woodworking, stamps, etc. If you don't want to pay for it maybe you don't want to do it that badly. Not everyone has to have a page on the Internet, not everyone who does necessarily has anything really to say. There's millions of ghost ship blogs their owners haven't written on in years.
We already have standards for moving this information around. It's called HTML, JPEG, GIF, all those web languages and filetypes you can open with any web browser.
What a non-issue.
When you're talking about "users" are you talking about the content producers / eyeballs - the little people whose social networks are expressed in Facebook and who've invested thousands of hours in Farmville and Mafia Wars? Or are they and their social networks "the products", and "the users" are the advertisers who sell things to those people? I can see how the advertisers might lose lots of money if Facebook content producers get bored or annoyed and go somewhere else, or do something else.
But for one of the little people, I don't see how there's a "potentially huge cost" to them if they get bored and leave. Ideally, they'd like to back up the contact information for their actual friends, and for some of their other Facebook friends, and back up their photographs, but if they've gotten bored and left that's an indication that the value they're losing is near-zero. If they get mad at an obnoxious Facebook policy and leave, there's some positive value that they're losing that's balanced by the negative that's chasing them out, but it's still their call. There's a "potentially huge cost" to Facebook if their content producers and eyeballs wander off, because they've got less product to sell to advertisers, but that's a problem for Zuck and the stockholders, not for the people who left.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Call me a curmudgeon, but the immediate impact - after the shock and awe wear off - would be people learning how to elucidate complex points again. In the early days of Usenet posts were longer and better thought out. That trend carried into email when POP3 and offline clients meant you had time to compose your thoughts. Webmail shortened people's attention span, since you had to fire off your message before the page expired. Facebook shortened it again: you don't have to even have a coherent thought anymore as you really only need to stab blindly at the stupid "like" button and click on pictures people think are funny. Don't get me started on Twitter, but let's just say in a language where you only get 140 characters per thought you don't waste any of them on verbs (or often vowels).
If Social networking died in a firestorm, the 'net would be quiet for a bit. But perhaps people would get back in the habit of thinking about things more complex than whether or not they "like" the video of the funny cat.
Nah, who am I kidding? Those days are past, and each generation is stupider than the last one now. Yay us. Alright then, I'm off to wash my '68 Thunderbird while listening to Steely Dan on my transistor radio. Damn kids.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
"Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button"
Download a separate browser, such as Opera, and devote it exclusively to Facebook.
Much easier: don't use facebook.
Seriously, if you disapprove of facebook's tactics, why continue to use their products? It's like all the peopole here who whinge on about privacy on the internet, then also say how great Google is.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it