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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."

18 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. How about I keep my data to myself by martok · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Posting my status updates and photos into yet another company's database doesn't appeal in the slightest. Put aside for the moment that they could be bought up and have their privacy policy changed. The inevitable data breach will expose my data in the end. There's a lot of talk about how Facebook sells our data to third parties. But how about why they are keeping it for so long in the first place?

    1. Re:How about I keep my data to myself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      giving in exchange for something, i.e. paid advertising IS SELLING.

    2. Re:How about I keep my data to myself by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      The user data is being given to those clients

      No it isn't. The clients specify the profile of the users they want to reach, and Facebook uses the data it has collected to place those ads. They do not sell the data to their advertising clients, they only sell access to specified segments of their users.

      They would be foolish to sell the data itself, since they could only sell that once.

      All this, of course, is not considering leaks.

    3. Re:How about I keep my data to myself by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As the Cambridge Analytica case shows, they do sell access to the data.

      Facebook did not sell any data to Cambridge Analytica.

      Facebook allowed university researchers limited access to user data. This was done at no cost, so there was no "selling". Those researchers then used the limited data with screen scrapers to get additional information on users, and then one or more of the researchers (not Facebook) passed the information on to Cambridge Analytica in blatant violation of their agreement with Facebook.

      Facebook was certainly careless and incompetent, but they didn't "sell" data, nor did they intend for most of the user data to be seen by anyone outside Facebook.

  2. WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not even a site... hello.com only talks about downloading some fucking "app". I have no phone. This is bullshit. And not a word about it in the summary... Retarded news.

    1. Re:WTF? by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Informative

      I have no phone. This is bullshit.

      They evidently feel that you, as a member of the PC-using minority, are expendable.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    2. Re:WTF? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      A smartphone app lets them track your location, see your cell number, email address, grab your friends list, etc.

      A desktop browser gives them none of that information.

  3. Re:Who pays? by AHuxley · · Score: 2

    User is always the product.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  4. Orkut was so popular... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

    That it eventually got shut down, and nobody cared.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:Orkut was so popular... by SeaFox · · Score: 2

      That it eventually got shut down, and nobody cared.

      They are hedging their bets on the idea Facebook's time in the sun is ending. Social networks were folding before because Facebook became the de facto one. Now with a mass exodus possible, someone wants to be the "place everyone moves to".

      If the King is dying, a new battle for the throne is about to begin.

    2. Re:Orkut was so popular... by siege72 · · Score: 2

      I was a fairly active Orkut user when it came out.

      If memory serves, the problem was that language requirements weren't enforced. Apparently Orkut was very popular with Brazilians, so most groups were overrun by Portuguese speakers -- even groups that had English listed as a requirement. English speakers abandoned Orkut, and the platform was forgotten by North American media.

  5. Too much competition by ArhcAngel · · Score: 2

    There are several competitors that are fighting to be the new facebook. I looked at several of them and they are already getting traction. I like the look of MeWe best so far but I'm keeping my eye on a few of the others.

    --
    "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
  6. It already completely failed for me by ZorinLynx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is no web version of it to use on a computer.

    If I'm sitting in front of my computer already, I don't want to have to use my phone just to access a site.

    1. Re:It already completely failed for me by markdavis · · Score: 2

      >"There is no web version of it to use on a computer."

      Yep, I came to comments to post that, myself. I can't believe it! A phone app ONLY? If you want to leak ALL your data to some company, forcing an "app" is the best way to do it right now.

  7. Available only as a smartphone app.

    There's likely a reason for that; to get permissions it would not get on a PC. No thanks.

  8. Re:Who pays? by rmdingler · · Score: 2

    User is always the product.

    Indeed. Monetizing these incredibly popular social platforms is the most distasteful part of the process. Sell users information, or tolerate intrusive advertisements.

    Given the recent telling-if-you-read-between-the-lines Congressional (capitalized reluctantly) debriefing of the facebook's founder, pay-for-play social media is under consideration... folks who spend US$100+ on cable they almost never watch are bristling at the mere thought of paying dollars a month for the hundred hours they spend each month on Zuck's site.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  9. Re:distributed or "nope" by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  10. Re:intrinsically defective by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Social media need the network effect to succeed. Facebook has grown big because many people can find their friends there (and then acquire fake friends)

    If they want to grow they need to work on a social media interworking protocol - so that you can link to people who use different social media platforms. They will not become the next Facebook, they might succeed as one of a federation of social media platforms that all work together. Facebook will refuse to interwork with other SM platforms until it finds that it is loosing users to the SM federation.