Breaking Open Facebook With FOSS 147
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 (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Well, it's about time (Score:4, 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]
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 outdated network won't die, they will just merge with the additional vocabulary from newer trendier sites.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.
Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (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. There's lots of pieces of a solution out their (FOAF, etc.), the problem is putting the pieces together and getting everyone on the same page (and that last part applies, separately, both to users and developers, forming a sort of chicken-and-egg problem.)
Quickly, they must not make money (Score:2, Interesting)
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]
Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 that new, IMHO they're sortof an evolution of the old party lines.
That said, lumping all devs out there in with those who think that facebook/myspace are reserved for 14 year old girls is ridiculous.
Re:Well, it's about time (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:Privacy? Facebook? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't get "Social Websites" (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 able to, for example, search for females who identify themselves as libertarians who live in my local community, is kinda cool. But really it could be anything... it's just handy to have another avenue to meet other people who have similar interests, whether it's politics, hobbies, reading, religion, whatever. The event posting thing is pretty cool too.
Don't get me wrong, social networks aren't perfect, and they aren't a replacement for meatspace interaction with real humans... but they're a nice complement to the other ways of socializing that we have.
Re:Decentralisation (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 registered as friends. Some, but not all, communicate regularly. Some fewer communicate with a subset via various methods (poking, wall-messages, private messages, etc. maybe even extra-system tracking based on e-mail sensed in routers around the world... hey, the info IS there...), and these instances can be weighted, counted and presented. It would look like nodes with pipes, sort of like HP Openview did years ago, or like any ubiquitous graphical firewall/system monitor tool. Think: Etherape. It could be dynamic, static, or a mixed snapshot.
The upshot of this is that those freaks out there building falsely "deep" infatuous relationships will have their funky little bubbles burst when the the REST of the world can start to see past the misleading "Top # Friends" listing, which is pointless whether that list is static (like most) or "rotates faces" like F/B does.
It also would be interesting for husband/wife/other relationships when new tags have to be made to reduce relationship destruction. Wife has 52x more communication density markers with friends than she does with husband? Oh, how to assuage his fears, curtail his growing jealousies.
Markers such as Platonic Friend, Current item, Ex-, Professional, Hobby Group and more could be shaped and colored nodes, with strength modified by fatter tubes. Stagnant relationships could be shown in "broken" or light lines; stronger ones with wavy or fat lines. Active and stronger ones still can be shown with pulsating lines.
Suddenly, it's no longer gospel who your TOP x-number of friends are. The volume, density/depth, duration, constancy, and such of your communications will determine publicly or privately who your REAL best friends are.
I am sure Visual Analytics has something like this for their data mining for showing the IRS, FBI, and others the banking, cell phone, and other relationships between people, business or personal, for crime monitoring, marketing, and other purposes. But for social networking, I imagine something non-patented is common-sense or obvious, given the tools that exist to make this trivial.
However, I declare this text of mine to be freely available in Creative Commons and GPL-like terms that allow Open Source to implement this. I don't give a damn about any patent trolls so if Myspace or Friendster want to take this idea, GO FOR IT. Anything to diminish the inroads microshaft will try to make by/from hijacking Facebook.
I reserve the right to personally or in team implement my ideas written above into any projects I so desire, patents be damned.
Copyright 2007-10-29-1710 PST David Syes
Please pass this idea around.
S
Re:Privacy? Facebook? (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 and sold to others long after you officially "deleted" it.
Re:Beginning to comprehend...what, again? (Score:3, Interesting)