4 ms·

A non-evil social network would have to be distributed and based on open protocols: you could be @facebook.com but could interact with people on other networks

• gaius 18y ago
  The thing all those interesting protocols have in common is that they mean absolutely nothing to 99% of people who joined Facebook because that's where their friends were, that's where photos are tagged and event invites are sent from.
  • plesn 18y ago
    I totally agree. But that's called a situation of monopoly. Shouldn't we be able to have inpact on laws that would protect us, and enforce more transparency and more openned up interfaces?
    • gaius 18y ago
      How is FB a monopoly?
      • plesn 18y ago
        You can change of social network (it's not a Microsoft-like monopoly), but as everybody's in it you have to be in it by pure network effect. In other markets like Brazil, everybody is on Orkut, so no real choice either, you have to be on Orkut. Idem for the music niche for myspace.
        • plesn 18y ago
          I would like to add that to break this network effect, you have to add a LOT more. In my opinion for example, Facebook is starting to break the MSN monopoly using it's own, as people are using it to chat.
        • unalone 18y ago
          I might be wrong about this, but isn't it only considered a monopoly if the aforementioned company is using its massive usershare to shut down competitors unfairly? Facebook is a free service, so it's not undercutting other sites. They're all allowed to get themselves lots of users too, if they can figure out how. The fact that social networks gain value with users means the solution isn't to "break up" a site like Facebook. That only worsens everything for users.
          • plesn 18y ago
            No, the solution is to open up Facebook! Interoperability is good for users!
            • unalone 18y ago
              I'd love that, but Facebook isn't going to. They don't stand to benefit nearly enough. So all their solutions - like Facebook connect - will stay them-centric.
            • gaius 18y ago
              It's hard to make that case, because ownership of data is ambiguous. For instance, if I have my phone# on my profile, and you sync it with your mobile device, fine. If you take my contact details and add them to your address book on another site, well that's not so fine. But is my phone number my data or yours in this scenario? Looking at my photos on FB is fine. Posting one of my photos on your wall or making it your profile pic is fine. Uploading it to another site in your own gallery... But didn't I put that photo on the Internet for all to see? Well, perhaps not, if I set it "friends only" on FB then there was probably a reason for that. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Facebook's technology and the terms of use of its API attempt to strike a balance for issues like this. Interoperability is fine on paper, but FB isn't just a website; it's a part of the plumbing of people's real lives.
  • mechanical_fish 18y ago
    Plus, distributed protocols are significantly harder to engineer. You have to design for the case where the remote provider of Function X isn't up, or doesn't scale, or will decide to hate you if you send it too much traffic. You have to formalize many APIs and fix them in stone, much earlier in the process than you otherwise would, because now you've got external services that will depend on those APIs and will break if you change them. This will tend to make big, open, distributed systems much less flexible and harder to evolve over time. When you combine that with the fact that most customers just don't care -- not until after they've got a lot invested in your site, at which point you're probably already a big success -- it's not surprising that the sites which evolved into big winners did so by keeping themselves fairly insular. Why spend money and time developing features that aren't important? I'm not holding out hope for distributed versions of things like Facebook. Not yet. It's not unimaginable that the user community will eventually embrace such things, after they've had a lot more training in the downside of walled gardens, but I think we're way too early in the Web 2.0 adoption cycle for that. Right now I'd settle for a baby step: An export API that lets you dump all your data out of a service in some sort of JSON or XML format. That would be unusable for 99% of people, but at least it would let them back up their data and hand it to some third party that might be able to read it for them.
    • brlewis 18y ago
      Atom and Media RSS are existing formats that let you export all kinds of data. Already OurDoings uses FriendFeed as a social networking hub, but thanks to Media RSS and SUP, you could plug in a different hub if you wanted to. And, of course, from the FriendFeed side you could plug in a different source for photos/stories of your doings if you wanted to.
      • unalone 18y ago
        Somebody downvoted you, because you are wrong, but you make a point that's worth debate. The problem is that nobody cares about Atom. Nobody cares about Media RSS or FriendFeed. The people that use services like that are in the slim minority, because it takes too long to understand, it takes too long to set up, and the biggest problem with open systems is that you don't retain tyrannical control over the information, which hurts your interface. I've been kind of an outspoken critic of FriendFeed for this reason. It's kind of the culmination of these "open aggregation" sites. The problem is, when you put them all together, you wind up with a slush pile. You get nothing. A bunch of tech-obsessed people will find value; the average user will find nothing. The theoretical solution is to reverse engineer every single site. That is to say: when I get tagged in a photo on Facebook, then show the tagged photos in the interface. If a friend uploads photos from Facebook and Flickr, then I see both of them - but not as a feed; I see it in a unified photo place. Furthermore, I need to be able to interact with those photos simultaneously. Say I'm looking at a photo gallery that contains photos both from Flickr and Facebook. The system would have to detect duplicates, unify the interface, and make it so that I can both tag the photo and add comments Flickr-style. It would also probably have to detect which comments are coming from what site, so that when I post my reply comments, it doesn't seem like I'm messed-up or out-of-sync - it could add two comment streams, but that's cluttered and messes up the interface. Now imagine this but for every single site a person would use. Integrated Tweets, Tumblr posts, Facebook notes, possibly Last.FM songs. Most optimally, integrated private messaging between the sites. And the challenge is not getting all that data - as you say, it's publicly available. The problem is unifying that data and producing a comprehensive grasp of it for the user. Facebook can do that easily, because they have complete closed-door control of that information. They know exactly how you'll be commenting on things, they know the actionflow for uploading photos and tagging people in notes and posting items and whathave you. With any attempt to duplicate that openly, you lose that absolute knowledge unless you're brilliant and figure out the one unifying thread between every single site you connect to, and that's a pretty damn tall order. The people who use FriendFeed as a social hub do not understand what people use social networking for. I've heard this argument a lot, that FriendFeed is a new-wave social hub. It's not. For most people, social is about personal connections. And that's not the same as "I know the person uploading this photo." It's "What was Mike up to last night?" "What is Christie saying about Valentine's Day?" "Who's writing what?" You could argue that FriendFeed shows all of these, in a way, but it misses this unification that I'd say is necessary. You can see photos and Twitter posts and blog entries, but you don't have this interface that says "This is Facebook, this is your portal, you can do anything you want to from this site, here's everything from your friends." In some ways it's more primitive than FriendFeed, and that's the point: people don't like complex systems. On FriendFeed there's a barrier between joining and doing. Not true on Facebook. This is going to be the problem with OurDoings, too. I hope you guys get a good userbase, because you have a neat service, but at the same time you're largely using other service's photos, or that's the impression that I get. You're even importing from other photo aggregation sites, which I find silly. Now, the problem is that for most users, if they're putting their stuff online, they'll stay there. You use Twitter if you want to post short blurbs, you use Flickr to put up your photos, and then if you want to read other blurbs or see other photos, you stay there. I mean, stories get told on Facebook all the time. Not "I remember when this was taken: such and such a thing happened," but "Man oh man was I drunk." That's the story that people care about, and that people will reminisce about. tl;dr, exporting data might sounds snazzy but most people just don't care enough.
• alabut 18y ago
  "now why are we building "jails" within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"?" Usability. Take a look at the Yahoo research on OpenID for an example of just one standard: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/10/open_id_research.html http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/10/open_id_res... Asking why people are flooding Facebook is a great question, one that often doesn't get asked by geeks, probably because we assume the problem is simple human flocking behavior and people herding towards where the rest of their friends hang out. Nope, that's a necessary but insufficient condition - why did that crowd form in the first place? Just try using myspace for a day and it's painfully obvious.
• eru 18y ago
  Email?
• Harkins 18y ago
  <i>why are we building "jails"</i> Easier to make money with a walled garden than encouraging agriculture.