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."

6000 applications...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

congratulations

[circletimessquare]

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

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

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Great Idea

[graviplana]

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.

Not the best idea

[ukpyr]

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 : )

And...

[msimm]

That's a bad thing? Frankly I expect to see a lot of these communities come and go. The only thing I find a little alarming is the hype that surrounds them. If the open source community wants to jump in, great and if not, great. Frankly I don't see the difference. Maybe after the hype has died down some of these sites will have hit on something substantial that can be wrapped into the kind of utility generally provided by the developer community, but until then all I see is a series of social and commercial experiments that frankly aren't that gripping helping people find something on the net.

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

[Bazman]

I love the little tagline on facebook: "join a network to see people who live, study, or work around you". There's me thinking you could just walk outside your front door, or take a stroll around your offices or college to do that...

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

[betterunixthanunix]

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?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Ah. The fact that they don't care is why no one ever wrote GAIM, Jabber, IRC, the old BBS's, Usenet, or mailing lists.

Getting them to agree on format is admittedly impossible, but it's obvious that they do, in fact, care.

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

[rickb928]

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.

Social Networking isn't a single concept

[jd]

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.

privacy fundamentalist alert

[circletimessquare]

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

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

[FleaPlus]

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?

Re:I don't get "Social Websites"

[rueger]

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

The important thing is the social graph

[crf00]

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!

A day late and a dollar short

[westlake]

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.

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

[rickb928]

Good guess.

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.

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

[CelticWhisper]

Maybe not, but I am, and I damn near run screaming every time I hear anyone talking about signing up for it. I have Thunderbird set to aggressively trash anything with "facebook" or "Myspace" in the subject or sender fields, and a few unlucky souls (mostly people who knew me in high school) have already found out the hard way just how averse I am to "social networking."

I have a Blogger blog, I have E-mail, and I have my realtime chat protocols (Jabber and IRC by choice, AIM because I can't get anybody else to abandon that frelling broken shitpile of a protocol despite my best efforts). If people actually find it a challenge to "network" with me in spite of those 5 channels, none of which are exactly difficult to use (okay, maybe IRC), then as far as I'm concerned it's not my damn problem. And if they're so helpless that they can't even figure out how to use E-mail, I question exactly how much good a friendship with them would bring me. Not for any reason of stupidity, mind you, but just for the fact that you would have to be insanely lazy to not bother to learn how to comment on a blog or send an E-mail message.

And you know what? All my good friends, the ones I care about keeping, have no trouble at all keeping in touch with me via those established, long-standing, well-developed methods. Coworkers and professors all use E-mail, which just plain fucking works, and never once have I considered how much better life could be if only I had a Space or a Facebook account. Fuck 'em.