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Breaking Open Facebook With FOSS
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Oct 30, 2007 05:34 PM
from the get-out-of-the-silo-free dept.
from the get-out-of-the-silo-free dept.
NewsCloud writes "Since last December, Facebook has grown from 12 to 47 million users and third-party developers have launched more than 6,000 applications with its API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends. Microsoft's recent $240 million investment in the company gives it all the capital it needs for further growth. Last August, Wired published two unusual stories describing how consumers might link together a variety of third-party services to emulate Facebook, and ultimately calling on the open-source software community to build alternatives to the service. Inspired in part by Wired, I've posted some ideas describing what would be needed for an open source architecture for social networking."
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Technology: Google's Plans for a Social API 83 comments
NewsCloud writes "After tonight's Breaking Open Facebook with Free Open Source Software, TechCrunch reports Google plans to announce an open API for social networking tomorrow. "OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks: 1) Profile Information (user data) 2) Friends Information (social graph) and 3) Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)" Says Om Malik: "OpenSocial attacks Facebook where it is the weakest (and the strongest): its quintessential closed nature...Even if you take Facebook out of the equation, the task of writing and adapting widgets for the every increasing number of social platforms was going to be turn into a colossal mess.""
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6000 applications... (Score:5, Insightful)
There should be a way to turn off app requests...
Re:6000 applications... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know what "us" you are talking about, but I've realized for years that Facebook has no effect on who, when, what, and how I connect with friends, and that's unlikely to change anytime in the near future.
Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting open source developers to even *care* about social networking would be a small miracle. Getting them to actually start developing code for one a step above that, and getting them to all agree on the same protocol/interface simply impossible.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As the author of the post, I'll disagree with that.
Hey, I think you are misreading my comment (which was just about the sweep of the description in TFS) if you think I don't care about social networking; I've been kind of idly interested in open (both in terms of "free/open source" and in terms of "freely interconnecting) frameworks for it for a while. Ther
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Getting open source developers to even *care* about social networking would be a small miracle. Getting them to actually start developing code for one a step above that, and getting them to all agree on the same protocol/interface simply impossible.
Don't speak for all of us. Personally i think that social networking sites are kindof neat. I use facebook all time. Its a great little time waster for when I'm dizzy from staring at consoles full of perl code all day :). On top of that, it lets me keep in light contact with my friends that are still in school.
I really think this is a generation thing. While previous generations had telephones and "little black books" we have myspace and buddy-lists. Things like facebook, or myspace aren't really tha
And... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting them to agree on format is admittedly impossible, but it's obvious that they do, in fact, care.
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Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just fine. I am, in fact. Facebook is supremely unimportant to me, and to most everyone I know. In fact, even the people I know who think they are 'active' on Facebook will admit that it's annoying, intrusive, and they use it less and less.
Facebook is growing, I bet, mostly due to new converts coming on faster than the jaded leave.
This will change. Buy your stock in facebook as damned soon as you can, cause it will go down in a flash. Or get bought by M$, and then it's too late.
Ugh.
Parent
Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guess you're not a college student, eh?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm wondering how the favorite app of college students is so darned important that it wil affect 'all of us'.
Especially when those college students will bail on Facebook when it costs them a job.
Decentralisation (Score:5, Informative)
RDF and OWL provide ways to develop a huge social networks with different features, different takes on it , with decentralized development and decentralized content while still maintaining interoperability. Support the semantic web it rocks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software) [wikipedia.org]
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Clarification (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What the thing might have or should have -- and this will hurt feelings -- is a measurement to show relationship (whatever kind it is) based on communication instances, volume, and more. Obviously, this means reading email between senders. I would not say go as far as posting the content.
But, say these "actors":
John
Vinh
Mary
Ving
Oster
Oscar
Susan
Kumiko
Davinder
KNOW each other and
Re:Decentralisation (Score:4, Interesting)
Once a standard is accepted, there are less network effects. Think of email for example, since SMTP has such a long history it means almost anyone can have an email server. Sure gmail, yahoo mail hotmail or whatever will represent most of the traffic but it doesn't matter. Contrast this with IM... lack of interoperability creates huge network effect, the switching cost is very high because you need to coordinate with all of your contacts to switch.
If social network rely on semantic web languages, the competition between websites providing hosting / editing of information will be much more efficient than in the current system... outdated network won't die, they will just merge with the additional vocabulary from newer trendier sites. Innovative networks won't starve because they'll be able to piggy back on existing networks.
Eventually, websites will have value not by being "the biggest" or "the one where most of your friends are" but by providing the best description of your relationships with people or the most useful tools to extract the most relevant information out of your data.
Parent
Well, it's about time (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Privacy? Facebook? (Score:4, Interesting)
API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends
Especially since we just learned that Facebook considers it a "perk" to allow their employees to surf people's profiles, read their email (which they're pushing HARD to get people to use as a sort of bastardized webmail) and see their "private" photos and such.
Oh yeah, and get your password, log in to your account, and upload explicit photos. [valleywag.com]
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you already put anything on Facebook that really shouldn't be there, it is far too late to take it down now. People don't seem to grasp the Ollie North effect: just because you "deleted" something doesn't mean it was removed from existence. Google won't even guarantee that it can permanently delete anything, and any major site is going to retain archived records for an indefinite period, which means it can still be distributed
congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
if you want privacy, you don't get convenience
and some people are shocked, shocked i tell you, to find out that a lot of people don't treat their private life with the security protocols of a swiss bank. because they simply don't care
next nonissue please
privacy fundamentalist alert (Score:4, Insightful)
a good example being: you just provided one above, thanks
a lot of people, slashdot being hotbed of such privacy fundamentalists, are of this weird hyperactive hysterical panic over every privacy transgression: showing your receipt when you leave a store, cameras in the innercity, etc.
in their mind, they can't balance some prudent, common sense situations where, frankly, your privacy doesn't matter. at all
privacy is AN issue to consider on complex topics. it is not THE issue. sometimes, privacy is the most important concern. and other times, privacy ranks lower in importance than other concerns. like before you get on an airplane. there are people in this world who want to blow up airplanes. therefore, people have to submit to privacy intrusions before getting on airplanes. beginning and end of story
but you listen to some people, and it's like the second coming of hitler, the shocktroops of a new fascism. well yeah, if you got your social education from a comic book and you are a paranoid schizophrenic, i guess
Parent
Great Idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Why an OSS Facebook would fail (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think millions of kids are signing up to Facebook for its function, you're probably wrong. Most likely they're doing this to be in with the groovy (or whatever they're called now) kids. That relies on branding and brand awareness.
An OSS facebook has no branding and coolness (perhaps geekiness, but that is not cool). Just like Coke would not care about an opensource cola, Facebook does not care about an open source service.
And do you really think that youngsters are worried about privacy?
Parent
Quickly, they must not make money (Score:2, Interesting)
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Uh, yeah. Exactly. Which is why we need an open-source replacement for MySQL, too, since it must also be offensive that MySQL AB makes money.
Where does the idea that open source is inextricably tied to opposition to people making money come from? Certainly, that's not the reason behind IBM or Sun's open-source efforts, or lots of other companies'.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3261815073 [facebook.com]
----
Don't let microsoft buy facebook
Business - General
Size:
890 members
New:
56 More Members
Profile updated on Friday
-----
And that's not the ONLY group in Facebook now wanting ms owning or having control in some way over user information, f/b direction, etc.
XFN perhaps? (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine if everybody had a blog that used OpenID. This could be decentralized. Friends could then login with OpenId and be identified what relationship they are with the OpenID URL from XFN.
http://gmpg.org/xfn/ [gmpg.org]
Not the best idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool idea though. The real take away is that creating services like facebook are fairly trivial from a development standpoint. All these features are being reabsorbed by the various web app framework makers right now. Building a facebook2 should take a lot less than a quarter billion : )
OpenQabal (Score:4, Informative)
OpenQabal [java.net]. OQ is all about developing social-networking and collaboration software that puts users in control of their own information (including the much mentioned "social graph"), supports identity federation, and facilitates distributed conversations. Development is just getting started, but we're working off of a couple of existing code-bases to get a headstart.
Disclaimer: I'm the originator, chief architect and, so far, sole developer on the project, so everything I say may be considered biased, slanted, unreliable, or whatever else your skeptical little heart pleases.
And sadly... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't get "Social Websites" (Score:2)
I don't understand the appeal of sites like "Facebook" or "Myspace". What they look like to me is web-based personal-website-creation tools. What is so interesting about a site that lets people make web sites about themselves? What am I missing? I already have a web site hosted on my own domain. Why would I want a Facebook or Myspace web site?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking only for myself, it's the "social" aspect that I find value in. I like meeting new people and find social-networks like facebook pretty good for that. Being
Re:I don't get "Social Websites" (Score:5, Insightful)
A small business may have a similar group of people who they would like to keep track of as potential customers, or who would want to know what the business is up to. Again, not your prime customers, but that second tier of interested people that a sole proprietor doesn't have time to keep in touch with.
With Facebook you can add two or three hundred "friends" and with no further effort see on a daily basis what at least some of them are doing in their lives. They choose to Opt-in, so you can e-mail them your news without worries about backlash, and since they choose what information to display to you, you get a pretty nice picture of what matters in their lives.
Probably two thirds of the friends that I have in Facebook [facebook.com] are people (including relatives) that I would never otherwise be in touch with.
Plus, you can turn all of these people into Vampires.
br
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't understand the appeal of sites like "Facebook" or "Myspace". What they look like to me is web-based personal-website-creation tools. What is so interesting about a site that lets people make web sites about themselves? What am I missing?
Well, apparently, you don't have, or have ever had any friends. I'm so sorry for you. :-)
It might be easy for you to make a website about yourself, and then other people who know you could perhaps google for your name and find it and know what you are up to. However, most people really really can't or would never do a website of themselves, or buy a domain name, or start a blog. And if you had a lot of friends who did, you wouldn't really check their blogs regularly, and you wouldn't bookmark fifty differe
slashdot (Score:2)
I stopped Social Networking a long time ago... (Score:3, Funny)
Social Networking isn't a single concept (Score:4, Insightful)
The "obvious" approach for an Open Source solution is to have a core component that is fairly generic, fairly light, permits data exchange between sites no matter how they specialize, and permits plug-ins to enable that specialization. (There's no shortage of object exchange and data exchange protocols, so I really can't think of anything in the core component that couldn't be slapped together from pre-existing Open Source code.)
You want something that's generic, because you want a reason for people to use the Open Source solution besides politics. If a person can totally customize their space to suit the specific sort - or sorts - of social networking they want to do, then you have a reason. Instead of maintaining one account for each and every type of social networking you want to do, you have one account, one repository and an infinite ways to tailor and filter it for each social circle you're interested in.
I really can't see anybody really leaping onto Facebook II or MySpace II - if they wanted to do social networking, they'd already have accounts on the originals. The only reason anyone might want a new system is if it can do something the existing systems can't. One thing the existing systems can't do is share data. Another thing they can't do is be polymorphic. Ergo, those are the two things a FOSS social networking site would need to do to offer anything new and exciting.
Would that be enough, though? Probably not. Hence the plugins, to allow users to include webapps and other features. Each user would then be able to do more than just include photographs and text.
Again, would this be enough? No idea. It would have novelty and personalizability, but it may be so flexible that it's unusable, people may be getting burned out on such networks, and existing systems have the edge just by being there first.
The important thing is the social graph (Score:5, Insightful)
Alright, I have a facebook account, and I have tons of friends, and now I come to Slashdot or some other site. I want to find out which of my friends are user of Slashdot too and I want to be able to add them into my social network in Slashdot, I want Slashdot's People modifier to work as it should without doing lots of work. I want to able to manage my network not only from Facebook but also from Slashdot, I want to find new friends through friends of friends or connection graph inside Slashdot, I want to add those friends in Slashdot and update the connection automatically to Facebook too.
I have a blog on Blogger, but I don't want to import my social network into my Google account. I want to let only my friends to post comment to my blog, but my friends don't have Google account or don't want to create or import his/her social network to Google. I want Blogger to be able to verify some anonymous to be actually my friends before allowing to post comment.
I have a Friendster account and I like Friendster more. I have some friends who only use Friendster and some friends who only use Facebook. I want my network to be synchronized within these 2 social network manager, and when I visit other site like Slashdot, I want to be able to import the 2 or more networks automatically.
I have a group of high school friends in Facebook and our group decides to create a new website. The group is well managed and controlled by ensuring everyone in the group know each other and are from the same school. Our new website want to be able to allow registration only from this group of people, so we want a verification system from Facebook between our website and our group.
I don't want to let everybody know who is my friend and how I connected to other people. I don't want to put what FOAF file on my website and let any people mine my private network information. I want to keep my social graph private and only available to my friends and sites I use, and I want authentication based on the social network. When I visit other sites like Slashdot, I don't want to tell Slashdot who are all the friends I have, I only want Facebook to find out from Slashdot that which are my friends are also using Slashdot and return the subset of list of friends. Social network should be private and it is very important to not expose it completely to public.
This is what the things that is needed, not what fancy profile or what superpoke application. With the power of a distributed social graph, alot of powerful things can be done. Other than that, privacy is IMPORTANT and should be always kept in mind. For this to work I have an architecture in mind and I think I should write on my blog now to share with you. Nevertheless, your direction is correct and I like this idea, lets do it together and make it a better social web!
A day late and a dollar short (Score:4, Insightful)
Once communities begin to evolve around services like AIM they become very deeply entrenched. There are 47 million reasons to chose Facebook over its FOSS alternative.
Centralization may distress the Geek, but it makes it relatively easy to monitor abuse, set parental controls, license media content and so on.
Re: (Score:2)
As if slashdot isnt enough of an echo chamber, you would like people to be more circle jerky?
How do you know what you want to read? I think the best slashdot comments are the ones you dont expect.
Re:Screw Facebook (Score:5, Funny)
Parent