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...
Sometimes I wish Slashdot would let me download my mod points in an open format and use them on another web site. I have some Facebook posts in mind that need down-modding.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
The value of most data decays over time and almost everything becomes worthless eventually when the owners die. So if Facebook and the like goes away, very little will be lost. There are literally only one or two books per century that are worth preserving.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Before the onslaught of a slew of "and nothing was lost" comments inspired by a mention only of social networks and Facebook, the Forbes article (as you can tell if you hover over it) is talking about any behemoth and specifically singles out Google and Facebook. The article title is actually "Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years".
It's also not talking about a total disappearance:
there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 â" 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.
So not quite the desolation that people are thinking. But if we're worried, why not look at what happened with Alta Vista or Geocities and go from there...
Myspace died or some would say on life support, and noone seems to mind. If people are dense enough to store all of their priceless data on a free to use social network, with no back-up and want to complain when it goes down and loose it all, its on them.
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
No, I'm not going to read the article because the summary screams of stupid. The first warning sign of complete idiocy was the claim that if Facebook collapsed there "would be potentially huge costs to its users". Um, what cost? If Facebook fails it will cost me exactly $0.00. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I don't know how to make that any clearer but Facebook's failure carries no costs for its users. Second, to suggest that social networks _must_ use open standards and that this requirement should be written into law is so staggeringly stupid it simply hurts my brain. So, no, I didn't read the article. I've been attempting to reduce the amount of stupid I'm exposed to and that summary tells me the article screams stupid.
There was a time when reading Slashdot was interesting and informative. That time seems to be quickly fading...
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.
Red Flag.
Elect consumers to the Board Of Directors of major corporations?
WTF?
Who would actually do the voting for a multi-national corporation?
Every citizen of every country where the company has an office? That obviously wouldn't work.
What would *really* happen is that governments would appoint some mix of politically connected toadies and agenda-driven left-wing activists who's only goal are to bleed the company dry.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The third should be to reform the corrupt structure of larger governments to include some legislative seats prohibited from being held by career politicians. Just a small portion of them, say all of them.
Signed.
I guess I am the only person on the planet who never got a facebook account
Me too!
Hey - we should be friends, and maybe use the internet to keep track of what other like-minded people are doing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Even better: let's imagine how productive, happy and content we'd all be in workers' cooperatives.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Facebook, or any social network, will naturally deteriorate with the next generation gap.
No teenager or young adult wants to be in the same social space as their parents
So to be rebellious they'll create Assbook.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
all data held about a user is downloadable by that user, in an open standard
This is exactly what Google+ allows. I have not used other social networks, so I don't know whether they offer this option (but am guessing mostly no).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
We need to make sure we preserve all those incriminating photos you posted on Facebook in your 20s so they continue to haunt you all the way to your grave.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What seems to be happening lately is that the "Web" companies are trying to force small phone-screen layouts onto big-screen machines. That's what "Metro" is. Even Mozilla has a similar thing in the works. (The menu bar moves to the bottom of the screen and becomes darker. New!)
The other big trends are slaving everything to the "cloud", whether it needs it or not, an anal-probe level of tracking, and an "app store". The goal seems to be to create closed ecosystems with no escape. It worked for Apple.
Not much in the way of new capabilities comes with this. Before Siri, there was TellMe, which was voice-driven, speaker independent, and useful for movies and driving directions, and Wildfire, which was a very nice voice oriented phone management system. Microsoft bought both and trashed them. TellMe shuts down at the end of this month. Microsoft instead suggests using Bing from your smartphone. While driving?
What we're really getting from smartphones is automation of the banal. Ten years from now, search engines will still be around. There's a market for being able to search through all the publicly available information in the world. The more banal stuff, the "social" stuff, will move to phones.
Tablets are output-mostly devices, and as such, tend to be used more for entertainment than work. Then again, as work moves to "machines should think, people should work", work computing may become more output-only.
Greetings, I'm an angel investor who manages a mutual fund derived from baby boomer pensions and union fees. I would like to know more about AssBook. Call me!
Recently I've been noticing advertisements on TV and billboards with a company's facebook page listed in addition to or in place of where you might expect to see a more full-fledged website's url. It reminds me of a decade ago when everyone was listing "www.foo.com or AOL keyword foo."
HS has backups of all your data. Why worry? Anyways, I'm a digital pack rat and can't find shit when I need it. And I don't want to look at pictures of my fat ass anymore.
1) Let the USER download their information to hold onto it? Ok, I suppose it depends what kind of data that is, but I suspect that users have systems much more insecure than facebook's (this is assuming this "open standard" will retain anything super sensitive)
2) What he seems to be saying is,"Let's make it formal that we're a fascist state by electing representatives to corporations." Now, some days I think the U.S. is much farther gone than on other days, but whatever mood strikes me this just seems to cement the idea in place that corps are government entities. Those elected entities are SUPPOSED to be the board of directors, elected by stockholders.
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The way I see it is that there is definitely a happy medium to having a facebook. I mean, you don't have to use all the functionality of it. I don't 'like' random things I find on there play any of the games or anything, I rarely post status updates, I periodically upload a picture or 2. Its mainly just an easy central point of contact for people. I see facebook as being similar to having my name in the phone book. And if someone is paranoid about being tracked, well, that's what noscript and adblock+ are for.
You are going to die.
No one will care about what you did on Facebook while you were alive.
You do not matter nearly as much as you think you do.
Best to actually live life rather than worrying about crap like this.
"Mandate open standards by firms"
Wow, where do I fucking begin with how ass-poundingly dumb THIS idea is. Mandate open standards for what, exactly? Data exchange? Data storage? The underlying schema? Write a law that defines how all social networks have to use 'standards' for how to do their business. Great. What a douchebag, just for thinking that this is even feasible under current law. While he's at it, he should define the companies that fall under this...theoretically, Slashdot could fall within it, as could Gawker. IF such legislation ever came to pass it would require that all companies in scope gut their internal systems and code to comply...think about that one.
"reform the corporate structure of larger companies to include some directors elected by consumers, rather than just shareholders"
Holy shit. He wants to just usurp all the legal precedent about the existential nature of what defines a corporation? Actually, no...it's far, far worse than that. What if it's pre-IPO (in other words, as it stands today) Facebook? There IS no board of directors yet...there are no shareholders, because there is no stock. So...force privately-held organizations to bow down and hand over control for free...or conversely, do the same to shareholders of existing corporations? Again, not even remotely feasible under law. Ownership and control are linked. You cannot, in a democratic and free society, just arbitrarily take control from people who own and give it to the masses. That behavior is for socialist, communist, and national socialist forms of government.
This faggot gives me a case of Tourette's that would make a sailor bleed from the ears. He should learn about government and the rights of individuals...and while he's at it, should study up on examples of what's happened when the government has mandated 'standards' in the past (like HIPAA)...before he comes out with this bullshit. And believe it or not, I'm a centrist/liberal!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The minute social networks start behaving like email (that is, work with protocols that communicate but anyone can actually run a server, preferably one of many available flavors) I'll get into them. Not before. Diaspora seems to be going that way, but I haven't yet gotten around to setting up a pod of my own.
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 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."" Why is this crap hitting the front page? Can we please just move articles like these over to socialistdot.org?
While I agree with you in this case. Let me point out a contradiction in your post. You mention that the companies have profits and then state it is a free market. If the market is indeed perfectly free, then there are no profits. Companies have no interest in a free market. They are trying to form monopoly positions to extract maximum profits. This leads to a never-ending struggle between government (i.e. the people) trying to preserve free markets and corporations trying to destroy them.
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
I guess I am the only person on the planet who never got a facebook account, and as such will not be impacted in some way when a firm that took all of your personal information and sold it to others fails.
Yay me!
Heh, well yeah I guess there are benefits to not having any friends. I'm glad Slashdot was able to brighten your day.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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*
I read that Forbes article about 80% of the way through... I tried to stop at "We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead," but for some reason, just had to keep going until I couldn't bear it anymore.
Holy hell... I'm on the internet 8+ hours a day on a desktop, and might average 15 minutes a day via mobile... I'm not sure what web he's been using, but the one I'm on is pretty spry. Everyone in my company is pretty much the same with the desktops/laptops, but I'm sure there are a number who spend more time with their mobile devices than I do.
How could ANYONE state that Google doesn't get mobile when they made the frickin' droid?!
And Amazon? It's not as mobile friendly, I'll admit, but they've added a lot of social aspects to their system over the years... so his argument about them not getting "web 2.0" isn't really that well founded, either.... and hell, they made MTurk back in what, '03 or '04? Isn't that a kin to what we now call crowd-sourcing?
And who cares how long Facebook is around? How can you even compare them to Google or Amazon? They don't do anything!
That guy... bsi. /rant
expletives welcomed
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
Eric Schmidt said it was an identity service. I have enough social networks available, and don't see any need for an identity service (especially one where I'm the product, not the user), so I didn't join.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This idea of preserving and saving everything is a little strange, especially considering that we are basically using the most volatile medium in the history of mankind, hard drives and so on. If you want something to last a long time, carve it into rock. Why would you want to keep all your social network photos/posts anyway? It's not like you'll ever look back over it or anything. Save it locally if you really have to.
I'm sure companies everywhere will be eager to list somewhere where the law dictates that they must give up one third of their representation that should be determined by ownership, in their company, to consumers. And I'm sure shareholders will be oh so eager to buy shares where their representation is likewise diluted, in companies listed in countries with such regulations. But dream on shiny socialists!
wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world.
The Forbes article smells like a Wired or Fast Company article from 1999. It even uses the much loved phrase of that time, "paradigm shift." And then there's this nugget:
"It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri for information instead of typing search terms into a box compared to thousands of enterprises ceasing to upgrade to the next version of Windows."
What?
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
You can already download all your data from facebook... Under Account Settings then Download Data, it gives you everything there.. easy.
As much as I and others have been able to avoid getting involved in social networking websites, it's not as though anyone should seriously believe Facebook would vanish into the night suddenly and leave everyone stranded. The only way Facebook is going down is through a competing product taking away its users, like Facebook did to MySpace.
Am I also only person without facebook account? Am not!
Am only one of those persons who do not keep anything worth worrying about on facebook.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
the government is not the people's only lever to pull, and probably shouldn't be the first lever we go to pull when we don't like something. just stop using the product. when all your friends stop using it, they will start to care. if everyone keeps using it and complains to the gov to try to fix it, the feedback loop is broken because like it or not, you don't influence your gov as much as the corps, especially when you enforce the corps position by continuing to use them when you don't like what they are doing. If you stopped doing that, you would start to weaken the corps hold on the gov as well. You don't just elect gov officials, you elect those corporations you are complaining about. No one is forcing you to use facebook, stop voting for them by not using their product anymore.
also, there totally are profits in a free market so your post is dumb. profit is not only extracted via a monopoly position.
Just think of countless billions of man years wasted on facebook each year could buy in terms of demand for goods and services or people actually doing their jobs rather than pissing their day away stalking their "friends".
Facebook going down would not ruin the economy...not only would the economy improve it would also enhance the lives of its former users.
If Facebook were to suddenly vanish tomorrow, and you could not access any of your posted material - would anything of value have been lost?
I do get on Facebook a few times a week... but I'd have to say "no". And I say that both in regard to my account and in regard to my FB friends' accounts. Others might not agree with me, but I see what they're posting on there - 50 years from now, the grandkids aren't going to care about that tasty sandwich or those cogent, insightful observations about Mitt Romney.
#DeleteChrome
Any company whose profit is distributed unfairly should be sized and turned over to the public sector where it will be administered to best fit the interests of the proletariat.
nice straw man...
really people, let the free market work. If Facebook does go down catastrophically, then it will show people that open standards are indeed necessary. Much like how Microsoft now uses an XML based format as its default document format after consumers threatened to run when they realized that their old corrupted documents were unrecoverable.
First; minor point; Microsoft moved to XML because XML was adopted by Open Office and then XML was written into government acquisition requirements by some misguided people who thought (pretended to think?) that this would be sufficient to guarantee open data access. Consumer demand and the (government independent) free market had little to do with this compared to the importance of open access legislation.
The free market is an abstract model not a real thing. Given network effects and the effect of plain luck, it's very plausible for a society to grow up which is completely dependent on Facebook for all sorts of communication and which collapses completely when Facebook is attacked, e.g. at the start of a war. In some sense this would be the free market functioning; competitive North Korean communism would be replacing uncompetitive unplanned North American captialism, but that's not what most of us mean by the free market.
The main thing you need to understand is externalities. Up until a year or so ago the externalities of Facebook were small on the scale of e.g. the US economy. Now, large amounts of commercial communication begin to depend on Facebook. Your farmer may stay in touch with purchasers through Facebook and, in some cases may already only have a Facebook contact. Continue this a little and people may actually starve to death if Facebook fails. This is a risk which doesn't cost Facebook anything. If Facebook fails they are failed anyway so won't (as a company) benefit from the world continuing. If he even thinks about this stuff, Mark Zuckerberg will be able to go to one of his friends private islands.
The government doesn't have to get big time in the way; they do have a responsibility, once something becomes "critical infrastructure" to ensure that it is safe, secure and reasonably protected. A very useful part of that is having "open standards" and ensuring that multiple companies can provide the same service. Doing that you even, artificially, create something like a free market in which ideas like yours might begin to work.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Pure hyperbole. What this guy refers to as "conventional thinking" in most of his articles is the trash he was programed with through "higher education." This is what happens when someone who is heavily business minded tries to interpret the writing on the walls and instead fills a piece with common buzz phrases to make it sound like he knows what's what. However he did bring up one correct point; we don't need managers any more.
Frankly, the paradigm Eric Jackson exists in is the exact same shared by those executives slowly dragging all our big industries into the ground. There are far to many corporations run by hack executives who have no clue what is happening in the real world. They sit on their pedestals and listen to the yes men they surround themselves with. Rather than researching and understanding global trends for THEMSELVES.
Fogey business and fogey politics have to go. The new age of globalization is here and there is no room for the middle men any more.
God I hope I pissed off some MBAs.
xcorex, dawg.
So to be rebellious they'll create Assbook.
Judging by your comment I'd be guessing you're new here.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Bwuahaha... yeah, right.
Author is missing the elephant in the room. He's thinking Facebook exists to serve its users at all. It doesn't. The users aren't the customers, they're the product. Facebook treats its users like a meat plant treats its cattle: Just well enough that they make a good product.
Google could've really shaken up FB, but they opted to copy it instead.
I will tell you what will destroy Facebook: A FB-like Dropbox-frontend. Something that allows you to share whatever you want to share, blurring the boundary between local and cloud by making "the cloud" just a directory on your device.
Dropbox (or any other cloud service) has the potential to replace FB by integrating with any and all local apps, giving you a "share this" button on everything that simply puts the file into your Dropbox public folder and notifies your social graph.
The entire business model of Facebook is built on holding your data hostage. Unless they were to become really threatened, they would be stupid to change that.
But a company whose business model is built on charging you for sharing and storing data would have you as the customer, and interested in keeping you happy, not the advertisers. Of course, this also requires something much more difficult than passing a stupid law: A change in user mindset. People would have to get used (again) to actually paying for something.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If the market is indeed perfectly free, then there are no profits.
Only according to the Strong Definition of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which is obviously false. People can trade their worthless gold for priceless grain, and other people their worthless will-rot-if-not-sold grain for valuable gold, producing profit to either side because a thing only has value to each individual at each different point in time.
If the Strong Definition was correct, then there would be no losses (except via taxation), either, even by the incompetent. Since some people CAN and DO lose their shirts in a free market, the Strong Definition describes a non-existent situation. QED
BTW, as to AC's contention that "it will show people that open standards are indeed necessary" , that is also false. Superior to closed standards, perhaps, but not necessary. It will always be easier for creators to not bother with open standards, especially if someone has a great new idea that doesn't fit into them, yet.
If a service is so valuable to its users then the company can charge for it and there is no reason for disappearance.
If the service is not valuable enough for its users to pay for it then nothing of value (to the users) is lost.
Although the most probable outcome is that a better service will appear and that will be the reason for the demise of the old one.
Strangely, the largest 'externality' you bring up us the following: if facebook ceases to exist, it will no longer provide all the benefits we have grown accustomed to. This is akin to saying that an externality of a car is that you may not be able to repair it in the future.
You've misunderstood me slightly. The externality is that due to the existence and use of Facebook, people will not be prepared for the use of other communication systems like the phone system or email. When Facebook fails those other services will also fail. Not just Facebook failing to provide service, but other services failing because Facebook fails.
Specifically; some of those other services, like the telephone system have been carefully designed to be reasonably reliable and rapid to restore even in problem situations. If Facebook leads to them not being used they won't be ready if they are needed.
The only finite negative externality that I can think of (other than green house gas emitted by FB server farms) is that some people are denied employment based on their facebook profile, although the employers that do the denying may consider this a positive externality.
There are of course lots more than that. People who don't want to be located are located because of their facebook profiles (battered women etc.). People have unprotected sex who otherwise wouldn't have. People go to parties and drink too much. People end up murdered. Let's keep this in proportion. These are normal things that come because of communication; lots of good things and lots of bad things; as such they are not Facebook's responsibility and shouldn't be when it becomes a proper common carrier.
Anyways, Facebook will likely never be the one-stop-shop for online communication. Email, blogs, twitter, and thousands of other services are growing in popularity even as Facebook continues to grow, meaning that many of facebook users are also users of G+, tumblr, instagram, etc... What this seems to prove is that people tend toward decentralization autonomously.
I hope you are right and this is why I don't think there should be specifically Facebook directed legislation now. However it's certainly something which people should study and watch. For example, if people do start relying on facebook for communication, merely pointing the dangers out to some of the bigger companies might lead to them insisting on backups being provided. However, if this does get out of control some kind of regulation might be a good idea. It certainly shouldn't be ruled out now because that would give Facebook even less incentive to behave sensibly than they already have.
On the other hand, facebook would love government regulations that dictated every policy it has and how it must be implemented. There is nothing better than a rat maze beaurocracy to stifle Facebook's next startup competitor.
Very simple to handle; "any service with more than two hundred million active users must within one year of reaching that subscriber number... "
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
What did all those businesses with Burroughs, Univac, CDC, Honeywell, Data General and DEC computers do when the companies stopped making them? In some cases successor companies kept them going with spares and maintenance for a while or offered some sort of upgrade path. But mostly it involved spending a lot of money porting software and data over to new architectures.
The reason those products disappeared is because of technology change - there wasn't a big enough market for mainframes when minicomputers emerged and there wasn't enough market for minicomputers when the PC emerged because the new buyers could jump to the latest technology without the legacy transition costs. That meant an additional cost burden for those who'd adopted the previous generation of technology as well as the ultimate end of their technology providers. That's how it is.
Guess what: Facebook will almost certainly ultimately go the same way as Data General. About the only long-established technology company that hasn't suffered a similar fate is IBM (and internally it's nothing like the same company it was in the 1960s). Something "better" will inevitably come along. Have you prepared your transition plan? Where is your backup?
The difference now is that nobody is paying Facebook monthly maintenance fees to give it some value during the transition window: when it goes, there's nothing to sustain it long enough for you to get data out that is valuable to you. The only hope you have is there is data worth sufficient to another company that they buy it and let you see it again.
Social networks have no commercial interest in allowing you to get your data out - if you can, you can conveniently give it to someone else and then its value is largely lost. You are the commodity - when you're gone, you're gone. Plan accordingly.
Facebook's reputation with the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles like these:
.
... was charged ... based solely on a Facebook photo and a
generic description offered to police by the victim's boyfriend."
Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the April 2012 competition to be voted the worst company in the United States
Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook, says:
"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."
There's more like that in the article.
Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox with the NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.
Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.
On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.
Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?
A few problems with Facebook: Richard Stallman wrote a short list of things wrong with Facebook.
How much information does Facebook keep? Read the December 13, 2011 article, Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages.
What do people in other countries think? The May 14, 2010 article, Facebook is not your friend gives one idea.
The June 15, 2011 article, The End of Facebook, and the June 14, 2011 article, Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? give others.
Most people don't understand the problems that may occur. For example, consider the March 28, 2012 article, Teacher's aide says 'no access' to her Facebook; now legal battle with school.
This April 4, 2012 article would be funny if it weren't so sad: Woman arrested for assault based on Facebook photo. Quotes:
"Aston
Defending herself required a "... court appearance and several thousand dollars in legal bills."
Open source will prevail. E
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.
I've live too long to depend on anything that requires power. Facebook will be replaced by something else... who cares.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
These suggestions ignore a critical issue: Patronage of these companies is entirely voluntary. If you don't like their terms of use or business practices, you can simply abstain from using them.
[quote]The second is to reform the corporate structure of larger companies to include some directors elected by consumers, rather than just shareholders. [/quote]
This IS a radical notion; it's also a terrible one as well as a legally problematic one. Corporations, at least in the US, are required to act in the interests of delivering profits to its shareholders. Consumers will always act against those interests as they want increased goods and services at decreased profit margins. You don't see union bosses sitting in on board meetings, do 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.
Facebook owes you nothing.
And that's where you fail.
Facebook owes you THEIR ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL because without you and the millions of others like you they have no product, no customers, no revenue and no business. This article tangentially points that out. Facebook must constantly refresh their interface to keep the new feel that garners more people, while covetously guarding their establish base to competitors sites who would love to poach users.
You're right that it's a symbiotic system, but Facebook will discount the needs of their userbase at their own peril. Are they smart enough to recognize that? It's hard to tell.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"If Facebook ever were to go down there would be potentially huge costs to its users. "
Yes, I will lose $4500 an hour if facebook were to go offline... Zomg! Zomg! Zomg!
If anyone loses anything of value if facebook were to go upside down they are complete morons. The ONLY value would be maybe a history of your inane drivel over the past few years that your great great grandchildren would be interested in. But anything else? If anything global productivity would go up if facebook were to go dark.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
None of the suggestions will happen.
My standard practice has always been not to get involved socially - whether on the web or IRL - right up front. This has worked 100% in warding off any kind of separation issues that would occur otherwise and I highly recommend it to anyone and most especially to those who think I'm some kind of target for their social interests.
These solutions are far too radical.
The first step is to limit the way companies like facebook may use our data in the same way telecom providers are disallowed from listening to our telephone calls. I think that can be done without any new law whatsoever.
We should just put a big "telecom" stamp on facebook, that's all.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Stupid question, how can there be a generation gap when children are born every day of the year?
Facebook allows you to download your data. I posted somewhere else on this story that I can't comment as to how comprehensive that export might be (I tried it once out of interest, some months ago), but there is something there.
I'm in total agreement with the original article when they're pointing out the fact that "Facebook might not be around forever". True of any website....
Where it loses me is the assertion that such a loss would have a huge impact on users and their personal data, if we don't pass laws demanding open standards to access said data for backup purposes?
Social networking sites, by their very nature, are about "what's new and fresh, right now". You pass around funny photos that your friends haven't seen yet. Once everyone's seen one, it's "stale" and worthless -- and it's on to the next thing. Your status updates are simple notes about what you're doing at that moment, and have very little value even a couple DAYS after they're posted, much less needing permanent archiving. Now granted, you *might* use a Facebook photo gallery as your "cloud storage" for your personal photo collection. But even so, you hopefully kept a backup of those photos elsewhere? There's no technical reason you couldn't that would require legislation of new standards for Facebook to allow you to do so?
It is not just social networks that are a source of this sort of problem. Apple computer is working hard to kill off old software programs by making them not run under their new operating system. Along with the loss of those old programs is the loss of the old data. In a great many cases there is no new software that handles the old data or does the function. Apple is killing old intellectual property.
Most of this software is used by small businesses who have no leverage with Apple and don't have the funds to write replacement programs. The result is the data is lost.
Additionally, the peak of educational software was during the 1990's and none of that software runs on Apple's new hardware and software. Apple has destroyed immense educational resources in this way.
The fact is Apple's new hardware is so powerful that it could easily emulate the old hardware and software FASTER than it ran on the old hardware. Yet instead Apple has dropped Classic and Rosetta support.
Bad at the core.
"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
We're talking about new business models. New data organizations and structures that support a new way of looking at user information.
So what "open standards" are they demanding that these companies use for data export/import? Each of them probably uses dramatically different database designs, and this is not a mature industry that has developed any standards to implement, much less open/shared ones!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's a service that let's you stay in touch with people you want to, if you want, when you want. Could you also find them in the phone book and call them? Or send them pictures on email instead. Likely, but I find Facebook an easier approach. If others don't I am fine with that too, but why this hate on changes in ways to communicate that people find convenient. It's like some people long after mobile phones where common place would argue against it in much the same way, or against IM, or against email, etc. (yeah, I'm old).
What's a Phone Book? /s
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Most people don't know how to do that. It looks like a giant task if you don't know how.
And where would they host those services? On their own PC? That's usually off (or not in range of a network if it's a laptop). These things are more difficult than they seem.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
From the article.
It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri for information instead of typing search terms into a box
Siri is great at understanding what you are saying with regular spoken language. But it does not just know the answer to everything! It would have to take what you said and send it to a search engine - exactly what Google is best at. Unless Google's results start to get worse than another search engine in some way they are not going away just because mobile is popular. People will still need to do searches from their mobile. And why does Android not count as Google being successful in the mobile world?
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Most people don't know how to do that. It looks like a giant task if you don't know how.
And where would they host those services? On their own PC? That's usually off (or not in range of a network if it's a laptop). These things are more difficult than they seem.
Actually they are much easier than they seem.
Anyone can figure it out with just a few web searches.
Mainstream hosting providers like GoDaddy (you know, the company with the hot chicks in the superbowl ads) provide always-on servers for about $6/month, with email and forum and wiki and blog software all installed. Most folks I know spend 10x that much on their cell phone plan.
The only reason Facebook is still around is that many folks are too lazy to take control of their own information. But not all folks. There are many millions of personal listservs & blogs & wikis & forums on the interwebs.
I find putting 127.0.0.1 facebook.com www.facebook.com in my hosts file helps a lot
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.
Ahh, here's what the guy is really after. Find a way to stir up support to go after them ebil 1%'ers. If the proletariat doesn't get a major voice in how the capitalist dogs run their money machines you'll lose all your friends on Facebook.
"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." This isn't the soviet union. These entities exist for one reason, to make money.
"Perfectly free markets" was obviously meant as sarcasm. AC's point was that free markets are a panacea, my point was that free markets don't exist.
Sorry for ranting on, but I had the same damned argument with a friend who wants to be a Certified Financial Planner.
Free markets obviously exist (see: flea markets, Arab bazzars, etc.); whether social networking websites have anything to do with free markets is another question entirely.
I would agree that freer markets exist, but even your examples are constrained. For example, can I sell my own homemade tablet at flea market and call it an Apple iPad. If not, then Apple has been granted a monopoly on that trademark, which is a restriction. Is the price for cocaine at a bazaar set by supply and demand or is it above that price due to its illicit stature? Instead of selling the goods for cash, could I sell them for a small payment now and a usurious interest rate moving forward? If not, then this is another legal constraint.
I am not arguing that constraints on the free market a bad. I believe they are necessary. For example, without the government granted monopoly of trademark, any website could call itself Facebook, which would have a significant impact on the value of that company.
> I find putting 127.0.0.1 facebook.com
> www.facebook.com in my hosts file helps a lot
That's not sufficient. You have to block all their known IP addresses with a firewall, coming+going. Here's my list in CIDR and address-range formats...
66.220.144.0/20 66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255
69.63.176.0/20 69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
69.171.224.0/19 69.171.224.0 - 69.171.255.255
74.119.76.0/22 74.119.76.0 - 74.119.79.255
173.252.64.0/18 173.252.64.0 - 173.252.127.255
204.15.20.0/22 204.15.20.0 - 204.15.23.255
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
its funny how all your garbage posts were rated -1 so quickly :)
Do you really believe facebook limits tracking via the "like" button to registered users?
I lurk to follow postings from my extended family. It keeps me in closer touch than I was previously. If I reply, I do it off Facebook.
Why has nobody mentioned a solution like Diaspora? It seems to address a lot of the submitter's objections (ownership of the data, provisions for backup) and provides a nascent platform for someone to share whatever information s/he wants.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman