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."

Decentralisation

[Arthur B.]

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]

OpenQabal

[psykocrime]

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.

Re:6000 applications...

[JensenDied]

Its alright this is the only application worth having
Dramatic Whitespace [facebook.com]

Profile too cluttered? Try this application: the aptly-titled "Dramatic Whitespace" will fill your profile page with copious amounts of dramatic whitespace (or a swath of any color) for the viewing pleasure of yourself and others.

Re:I don't get "Social Websites"

[skrolle2]

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 different website that may or may not change addresses to keep track of those people. And if they're the kind that don't have their own website, they would NEVER ever find yours. So you remain disconnected.

Facebook, like most other social networking sites, lets you find and connect with people you know. However, Facebook does a few things differently and better, which is why it's such a big success right now.

First, people use their real names. There are no "usernames" or other shit I'm supposed to know about people. Instead, they just use their real ones, which makes it a helluva lot easier to find people. I have a few friends who, like me, sign up to every social networking site just to check out the features, to see where the market is going, and we all noted something special about Facebook, we found a lot more friends and acquaintances than we have ever done on other sites. I reconnected and talked to old, old friends I haven't seen in 15 years. That's awesome.

Second, Facebook is actually tighter than most similar sites, since you can only really see people that are your friends, or are in the same network as you. This actually makes a lot of sense, since the absolute majority of users are not interesting to me and vice versa. There's a small subset of users I'm interested in, and I really couldn't care about the rest. If the irrelevant users are shoved out of my way, I can focus on the ones that are interesting.

Third, Facebook has internal feeds so that I can get to know, at a glance, what my friends are doing. Most of the people I've added are people I speak to pretty rarely, I would probably never email them or call them and ask how their lives are, but now, I get a little feed of it straight to my facebook homepage. Relationships starting or ending, babies born, travels done, where people work, what people do. It's ok if most only update their stuff every month, I get a slow trickle of interesting events.

Fourth, Facebook Apps allows every user to customize Facebook into what THEY like to do online, it's customized stickiness. If I want to compare movie-tastes with my friends, send funny links, find old classmates, find old colleagues, play web games, or a lot of other stuff, I don't need to get my friends to sign up to a different website for each of those functions, we can do it all on Facebook via different Apps.