
OneSocialWeb: We’re Ahead Of Diaspora In The Creation Of An ‘Open Facebook’ - jfi
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/onesocialweb-were-ahead-of-diaspora-in-the-creation-of-an-open-facebook/
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naner
Honestly, I am dumbfounded at all the money and publicity that is getting
thrown at Diaspora when they haven't really accomplished anything yet.

I don't think OneSocialWeb will succeed, either. What will likely happen is
Facebook will adjust their course or a slightly different Facebook clone will
come out with sensible customer-focused privacy policies (like Mint or Wesabe
had) and ways to get your data out if you want to leave.

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commandar
Absolutely. I'm actually kind of surprised at how relatively inept Google is
in the social networking field. They have Orkut, but it's pretty much a flop
in the US. I mention it in another comment, but they have pretty much the
perfect platform in Wave for building a serious distributed social network,
but instead bill it as being a glorified email replacement. And Buzz? Is it
even worth talking about?

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anigbrowl
Me too, but I'm starting to wonder if they're holding off because they don't
want to be the subject of antitrust complaints.

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angstrom
Might as well give all those high paid lawyers something to do.

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WorkerBee
What I said in comments on the other story
(<http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1344138>):

"When I last thought about it, I became convinced that we don't need an single
_implementation_ , we need _standards_ for multiple implementations to
interact. Stuff like RSS, OpenId, OAuth, etc. It's a lot less glamorous to
work to these, and to try to push them forward, but it's a lot more useful."

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wmf
After Diaspora works, it should be easy enough to standardize its protocol.
Fixing a non-working, prematurely-standardized protocol is likely to cost
more.

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WorkerBee
Based on other experiences that's "if", not "after".

But no, it's not easy, unless things like OAuth and OpenId implementations are
easy to you, which puts you in a very select group.

What about all the other distributed social media experiments, which have been
around longer, done more, and are working with established protocols? I still
think that this is the real way forward.

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inboulder
OneSocialWeb, Diaspora et all are solving the wrong problem but are getting
attention because of the general grumblings about Facebook. The issue causing
the most Facebook user dissent is privacy. Open protocols do little to address
this; having your whole social graph (think embarrassing pics) sitting on any
server out of your control, whoever the owner, is the problem.

What is needed is a system that guarantees privacy by storing your social
graph is such a way that it cannot be data-mined, sold, leaked, or linked by
other websites. One way to do this is to have all data on the server be
encrypted where the key only resides on the client side.

OneSocialWeb does nothing to solve the privacy problem.

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orblivion
I think Diaspora may have this one covered:

<http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html>

"Distributed Encrypted Backups"

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inboulder
That's a 'backup', that has nothing to do with all social content on the
servers being unreadable to anyone but those in the graph.

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commandar
I haven't read too much on the technical side of things about this yet, but
TechCrunch's quick rundown sounds a lot like what I was arguing Wave had the
potential to become when it launched a year ago.

If you stepped back from Wave and stopped looking at it as fancified email and
instead as an extensible platform for arbitrary data, it seemed blindingly
obvious to me that the next step would be to build it out into a full fledged
social networking service. The fact that both projects are built on top of
XMPP definitely strikes me as interesting, as well.

I've always been a little dumbfounded that the part of Wave everybody talked
about was the collaborative text editing type stuff in the I/O demo, when if
you read any deeper, it should have been clear that that stuff was just a UX
tech demo and that the important part was the underlying technology.
OneSocialWeb sounds a lot like somebody is building a similar technology
specifically in the direction I thought Wave would go.

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yesbabyyes
Committee. I don't have any grounds for this, but I get the feeling that this
is a very typically European project. The website and the fact that it's
backed by Vodafone set off my bells. These kinds of projects by states or big
corporations usually never launch, but are instead drowning in bureaucracy.

I might be wrong, but this fact alone makes me think Diaspora are doing the
right thing in finding their own path.

It doesn't matter a lot to me though, I'm certain that we will build an open
social network soon, whether OneSocialWeb, Diaspora or something else.

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mambodog
When that spreadsheet of Facebook alternatives was posted the other day, this
one ticked the most boxes. Taking a look at their site though, I was greeted
by talk of protocols and invited to 'get code'. I know its just early days,
but this isn't how you get people using your social network. I want to jump
right in. This... is not what I want.

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aquinn
Yeah, it would be nice if they had an open server that allowed you to sign up
and check it out. There's nothing stopping anybody from setting one up though.

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brm
The money makes things interesting even though they've made nothing yet.
Imagine how things change from a momentum standpoint if they work on the 10 or
15k they planned to this summer and use the rest of the money to get people
like Chris Messina and Caterina Fake working on the project

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lo_fye
OneSocialWeb is ahead, but their solution is geek-oriented, complex, and ugly.
Any solution that's not mom-oriented, simple, and pretty just won't catch on.

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joubert
Why do these folks complain about publicity - it is an initiative of Vodafone
for goodness sake, the worlds _largest_ mobile phone operator.

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orblivion
Well get them to hop on Kickstart, see what happens

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c00p3r
No one needs yet another facebook or yet another microsoft.

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cianestro
Why not just use a vpn?

