Facebook Competitor Orkut Relaunches as 'Hello' (bloombergquint.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: In 2004, one of the world's most popular social networks, Orkut, was founded by a former Google employee named Orkut Buyukkokten... Orkut was shut down by Google in 2014, but in its heyday, the network had hit 300 million users around the world... "Hello.com is a spiritual successor of Orkut.com," Buyukkokten told BloombergQuint... "People have lost trust in social networks and the main reason is social media services today don't put the users first. They put advertisers, brands, third parties, shareholders before the users," Buyukkokten said. "They are also not transparent about practices. The privacy policy and terms of services are more like black boxes. How many users actually read them?"

Buyukkokten said users need to be educated about these things and user consent is imperative in such situations when data is shared by such platforms. "On Hello, we do not share data with third parties. We have our own registration and login and so the data doesn't follow you anywhere," he said. "You don't need to sell user data in order to be profitable or make money."

Comments

Re:distributed or "nope"

[TheRaven64]

I don't necessarily need to run it myself, but for me to be willing to sign up, I need:

To use an identifier that I own and can port to another provider without their cooperation. For example, something based on a domain name that I own, as with email. A large number of email providers, for example, allow me to point my DNS records at their server and use them to handle my mail. This dramatically reduces lock-in, because if I don't like them I can just point the DNS records elsewhere.

To be able to extract all of my data in a standard format. Again, with email I can move between providers by just pointing an IMAP client (including a command-line tool like imapsync) at both and telling it to move my data.

To use a federated open protocol, so that I can communicate with users who do not use the same provider. Again, with email I can communicate with people who host their own service, people who use an employer-provided service, people who use a free service such as GMail or Hotmail, without any problems.

To be supported by multiple implementations. With a single implementation of a protocol, you have no guarantee that it's actually documented well enough for anyone else to use and you have no guarantee that it doesn't expose implementation details by accident. Equally importantly, if there's a single implementation then there's nothing stopping the developers from pushing the UI in a direction that I don't like, because there's nothing for me to switch to. Again, with email there are a load of different clients (native and web-based) that I can use, so if one annoys me then I can switch without losing any of my data.

Diaspora appears to be pretty close to this. The federation protocol is mostly sane and has a few implementations (though putting an extreme copyleft license on the reference implementation wasn't such a great idea), though the client-server part of the protocol doesn't seem to be very well documented or possible to support with different implementations. Ideally, I'd want to see a clean separation between client-server protocol and web UI, so the web interface is just that: an interface that talks to a back-end server as a separable component. Again, this improves competition because someone else can easily decide that they hate the UI, write a better one, and reuse all of the back-end code.

Oh, and in an ideal world it wouldn't involve PHP. Anywhere.