Breaking Open Facebook With FOSS

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."

Screw Facebook

Man.. they got this thing that has vampries/werewolves/zombies right? And you can "bite" all your friends and such.

It sounds great! But EVERYTIME they fight eachother you get a notice of it. So I log in every morning(at work of course) to find out theres about 35 fights to go through.

Re:Screw Facebook

I don't know what the hell kind of drugs you are on, but your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

6000 applications...

and every single one drives me nuts. No, I don't want to post on your fucking SUPERWALL, be in your TOP FRIENDS list, or answer pointless quizzes.

There should be a way to turn off app requests...

Re:6000 applications...

Personally, I look forward to a FOSS facebook clone. It will have the fun and human warmth of LKML, the ease of use of vi, and the male-female ratio of an 18th century ship of the line. **bliss**

Beginning to comprehend...what, again?

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.

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?

Note: Posts like the parent? The reason it'll never work.

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.

Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again?

then you wouldn't know whether they liked Britney spears or not, or be able to see 100 drunken photos of them before you even said hello.

Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again?

I agree. I was a facebook user for a while, but after being kicked off (in a blatant act of censorship, as far as I can tell), I've noticed something: life without facebook is no different than life with facebook. Facebook serves a need for communicating with friends, but so does e-mail, instant messaging, and the phone. 80's-style BBS's served the same purpose, and I would say they qualify as "social networking."

Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again?

How will I ever get along without Facebook?

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.

Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again?

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.

I'm guess you're not a college student, eh?

Decentralisation

I think the secret to efficient social networking is decentralization, both of content and of standards. This is achieved by the semantic web... Take a look at FOAF, it's a simple exemple of how it could work. Host a RDF/XML file anywhere describing your connections and you're done. Extend the kind of vocabulary describing your information and your relation to people at anytime using OWL.

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]

Re:Decentralisation

The point is not to actually have decentralization but rather the possibility to have it. To take an analogy think of open source projects, the point is not to fork them - on the contrary - but the ability to do so creates incentive that affect the result even though it's only one trunk.

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.

Well, it's about time

It's about time that there was some way to focus on the social network you're already with versus wading through "invitation-only hype" to get there.

Privacy? Facebook?

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]

congratulations

if you want convenience, you don't get privacy

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

sometimes, privacy is of secondary importance

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

Great Idea

Building an Open Source version of Facebook is probably one of the smartest thing people can do right now in this Web 2.0 (*shudder*) world. More to the point, privacy advocates should be actively boycotting Facebook if they know what is good for them. I refuse to use it. The people who maintain it have too much power and it has reached a level of social and interpersonal networking utility that trumps novelty and freedom for conformity.

Why an OSS Facebook would fail

Branding & peer pressure.

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?

Quickly, they must not make money

Why does facebook need to be replaced by something open source? Is it offensive for them to make money?

XFN perhaps?

XFN, the XHTML Friends aims to identify relationships with links.

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

Cloning Facebook would be pointless. Unless your providing something above and beyond what Facebook offers, why bother? Average users won't be engaged by the privacy angle and so, won't switch.

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 : )

Census data or electoral roll

How hard would it be to get the electoral roll data and plug it into a facebook like thing. Then you could have "Friends", "Relatives" and "Colleagues". You would have everyone in there and half the really important relationships ready made for you.

Where could you get the colleague data from? How do you know who works where?

OpenQabal

There are probably other FOSS projects to create a truly decentralized, federated social-networking and collaboration package, but the one I'm intimately familiar with is
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...

And sadly, those of us who are involved programmers in the FOSS community aren't social enough to have a Facebook profile.

I don't get "Social Websites"

I think I missed a boat somewhere. :)

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:I don't get "Social Websites"

In anyone's life there are hundreds or thousands of people that know you, but with whom your relationship doesn't rank quite high enough to merit weekly or even monthly e-mails or phone calls. That doesn't mean you wouldn't like to keep track of them, where they are, or what they're doing.

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

slashdot

is my social networking, mmo, blogging, news aggregator site built on foss.

I stopped Social Networking a long time ago...

/etc/init.d/net.social stop

Similar ideas are already being worked on

These basic ideas are already being worked on with such systems as myVocs [myvocs.org] (pdf) [stonesoup.org], IAMSuite [mams.org.au], and CoManage [internet2.edu]. It is an idea whose time has come due. It's basically about the web maturing and adopting system boundaries (however loose or tightly you want to define them). It's a similar transition from DOS->Win->NT (or any batch to multitask migration you want to draw a parallel to). The web is about like DOS right now.

Social Networking isn't a single concept

There are many forms of social networking site, from the business-oriented LinkedIn to the meet-and-greet sites like Facebook to the blogging-oriented LiveJournal and MySpace. (And even those two attract very different users.)

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.

Mugshot from Redhat

Isn't Mugshot [mugshot.org] an Open Source social networking endeavour?
I haven't used it but it looks like [mugshot.org] it makes sharing the sort of the stuff that gets shared on facebook fairly easy (perhaps with a little less crack).

I'm not sure if it tell you when it's someone you know's birthday. That's just about the only useful feature I've seen on Facebook.

The important thing is the social graph

You missed one important point: I don't care about wheter my fancy profile can be imported or exported easily from somewhere else, but I need my social network to be available in any other website that I visit. Here is my explanation by example:

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!

Highly Misleading Article Title!

Who didn't think that the article title referred to circumventing the security model of facebook, via Open Source?

Wait... they want _LESS_ privacy?

Now, I am well aware that information posted to a social networking site is not especially private, but what is probably the main draw of Facebook over MySpace is networks. By default, only people in one's network can see one's profile and Facebook allows one to set whether each part of one's profile is viewable by everyone, people on the same network, friends even with limited rights, or friends with non-limited rights. (Having a limited rights level for friends seems silly to me, but it is in there.) The network plans discussed in the article are all completely open so anyone can see anyone else's profile. That is not what I, nor likely many college students, want in a social networking site.

Mugshot

Red Hat is doing something close to this through their Mugshot project [arstechnica.com]. It has progressed [mugshot.org] quite a bit since that Ars Technica write up and is an important component of GNOME's Online Desktop project [gnome.org].

A day late and a dollar short

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.

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.

OpenSocial from Google

via Om Malik's blog tonight http://gigaom.com/2007/10/30/opensocial/ [gigaom.com] Google's (GOOG) much awaited answer to Facebook ecosystem is finally coming to light. The existence of this Google platform was first reported by TechCrunch and is going to become official tomorrow. Google will announce its new social networking initiative, Open Social on Thursday. Joining Google and its Orkut social network are other partners such as XING, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Newsgator and Ning. OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications. So, is it FOSS?

facebook = book of faces

What really scares me about facebook is simply that they know what everyones face looks like. The amount of biometric information that they have direct access to is surely more than that of any three letter agency.

mashing together everything

is a great idea. soon after it would be nice to have complete convergence of all communications... t.v., computers, cell phones, ... i guess this won't be really possible until there is an affordable reliable hand held computer

Facebook unrestricted = crap unlimited.

#include {getoffmylawn.h}
One of the things that MOST attracted me to Facebook originally was the LACK of shit and fluff on peoples pages. There were well defined sections for interests of all sorts, a place for education and work history, a separate space for pictures, simple messaging and a plain wall for public posts.
*sigh* It was all clean and functional, unlike the all-singing, all-dancing, animated, music playing, embedded video eye-rape that is a typical Myspace page. It was also nice that only university students or grads could join, 'cause lord only knows there are enough 'tards on the net. Narrowing it down to only College-Educated-'Tards was a plus.

Now I know some apps are good, and I even use one or two, but 99% of all apps are shit, and it's because anyone can write one and put it up. If Facebook had decided on a vetted system for apps, we would (most likely) still have the good ones, and certainly much less of the fluff.

Now, with the now open-enrollment and allowing any dumb app that comes along, Facebook has opened the floodgates to Lake Shitty-ka-ka of the internet. "New" Facebook may have increased it's user base a ton, but as a result it is now more like Myspace; that's a loss in my book. The Bait-and-switch of Facebook pissed me off, but so many of my friends use it and it's still a bit better than Myspace (despite their efforts).

The point of all this being: If something FOSS could replicate the way Facebook was, I'd join in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the momentum is so great I don't see that happening.

Facebook Terms of Use and your rights, Lawyers?

I have a question for the lawyers here:

After reading through Facebook's terms of use, I came across this little gem:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

To my non-lawyer mind, this seems to me like they own anything you post, bar none, full stop. They can use it however and for whatever they like and you can go cry to mommy if you don't like it.

I see the part where it says you may remove the "User Content" and the license automatically expires, but how does this jive with an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid [and] worldwide license" and "...the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content"? (Emphasis mine)

Am I wrong in assuming that Facebook can use your material however they please, sell rights to use it to whomever they want, and will retain those rights indefinitely? I'm far from a professional photographer, but I have a friend on Facebook who is an aspiring pro-photographer. I don't want my pictures used without my knowledge, but I could live with it. My buddy would be far more impacted if one of his pictures started making money for someone else and not him.

So, do I have anything to worry about here? Should I tell my buddy not to post his "professional" pictures? I can understand that there must be some sort of agreement made to host content, but this all just seems too draconian. Do other dedicated photo-sharing sites like Flikr have better terms that don't walk all over you?

Re:Crap...

Indeed... [xkcd.com]

Re:slashdot comment profiling

"slashdot could build comment moderation profiles and then offer a filter of only the type of comments I'm going to want to read"

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:Crap...

Unsurprisingly, it appears to be taken [assbook.com], and by a Facebook alternative.