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".
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...
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.
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
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.
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 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*
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
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();
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
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.
Gopher is the future my boy! Not this flash in the pan Http protocol!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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