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Perhaps there would be mileage in an app (or browser plugin or Evernote mashup etc) that created backups of your Facebook data in some way. Impetus / further e

Perhaps there would be mileage in an app (or browser plugin or Evernote mashup etc) that created backups of your Facebook data in some way. Impetus / further example: A friend of mine took the decision to remove himself from social networks for privacy reasons. While I respect his decision and motivation, the loss of comments on our holiday photos from his albums was a real shame. Further application: 1. Access to historical data/ versioning of your own and others pages (ahem, all sorts privacy issues there). 2. Those popular map-the-people-i-know graphics could be created as videos showing growth over time. 3. Generating a Lulu book from the collected data (I think we all know at least one Facebook addict who would love this). Of course the irony is that Facebook would likely have ban you for using anything that mined your account at any sort of interval. To avoid suspicion it would need to be "watching" (or mimicking) your regular access and saving the juicy bits rather than logging in for you and crawling.

jerf 18y ago
What we need is a decentralized, XMPP-or-similar-based Facebook clone that you could own. I'm not a Facebook expert but I've been shoulder-surfing as my wife uses it and I see little that could not be cloned in this manner. Facebook itself is almost entirely unnecessary, and not with "pie in the sky" technology that may exist someday... it could be done right now.
- Rod 18y ago
  Any concrete ideas on how to implement that idea? Sounds really interesting.
  - jerf 18y ago
    It's technically so easy it's hard to even make it take long to describe. Define XMPP pubsub nodes that correspond to the events of interest. Create a client that subscribes to these nodes and translates them into web events. This is probably a good time to consider a non-SQL based backend. Personally, I'd do it all in the context of ejabberd + yaws using Mnesia. If I'm feeling particularly saucy, I would use comet-connections to make all the events live, not just "chat". (That's an advantage you would get from the web server and XMPP server being in one (OS) process; the same event can very, very easily trigger both XMPP handling and some JS shipped down to a user with one handler.) I would actually not bother scaling to umpty-bajillion users, the entire idea for people to actually own their implementation and for there to be bajillions of implementations out there. I could pretty much spec this in my sleep and implementation wouldn't be that much harder. The thing is... that's not the hard part. The hard part is getting people to use it, and "I provide a hosting service for the first few thousand people and create a de facto point of centralization" rather defeats the point. I have no idea how to address that step.
unalone 18y ago
I use PhotoBook (http://www.caffeinatedcocoa.com/photobook/index.html http://www.caffeinatedcocoa.com/photobook/index.html) to add photos I like into iPhoto. Now that '09 lets you sync automatically, it looks like perhaps that won't be needed either.

jerf 18y ago

What we need is a decentralized, XMPP-or-similar-based Facebook clone that you could own. I'm not a Facebook expert but I've been shoulder-surfing as my wife uses it and I see little that could not be cloned in this manner. Facebook itself is almost entirely unnecessary, and not with "pie in the sky" technology that may exist someday... it could be done right now.

Rod 18y ago
Any concrete ideas on how to implement that idea? Sounds really interesting.
- jerf 18y ago
  It's technically so easy it's hard to even make it take long to describe. Define XMPP pubsub nodes that correspond to the events of interest. Create a client that subscribes to these nodes and translates them into web events. This is probably a good time to consider a non-SQL based backend. Personally, I'd do it all in the context of ejabberd + yaws using Mnesia. If I'm feeling particularly saucy, I would use comet-connections to make all the events live, not just "chat". (That's an advantage you would get from the web server and XMPP server being in one (OS) process; the same event can very, very easily trigger both XMPP handling and some JS shipped down to a user with one handler.) I would actually not bother scaling to umpty-bajillion users, the entire idea for people to actually own their implementation and for there to be bajillions of implementations out there. I could pretty much spec this in my sleep and implementation wouldn't be that much harder. The thing is... that's not the hard part. The hard part is getting people to use it, and "I provide a hosting service for the first few thousand people and create a de facto point of centralization" rather defeats the point. I have no idea how to address that step.

unalone 18y ago

I use PhotoBook (http://www.caffeinatedcocoa.com/photobook/index.html http://www.caffeinatedcocoa.com/photobook/index.html) to add photos I like into iPhoto. Now that '09 lets you sync automatically, it looks like perhaps that won't be needed either.