
The Unbundling of Social Networks - srikar
http://www.skepticgeek.com/socialweb/the-unbundling-of-social-networks/
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EGreg
Actually the core will unbundle as soon as there is a platform that can
decentralize the actual social networking. The accounts, connections,
authentication, subscriptions and notifications, realtime group experience
(like chat) etc etc.

Right now to see what your friends have posted on fb you have to be on fb and
be in their friends' list. Which leads to a snowball network effect. Imagine
if you had to do the same in order to receive your friend's email from down
the hall!

Right now people in an african village have to be connected to the internet
using baloons or drones in order to communicate WITH EACH OTHER and share
videos and photos taken on their phone. Why does their signal have to travel
halfway around the world to a fb datacwnter just so they can plan what's for
dinner?

This centralization is actually perverse and a SYMPTOM of the lack of standard
for decentralized social networking, and open social network implementations.
Diaspora was one attempt, but what else is out there?

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dkyc
I think the limitation is more technical than you make it seem. Why is there
no network-level decentralization for social networks? Because P2P connections
have a habit of being unstable, unreliable and hard to initiate. What if your
desired peer is offline at the moment? Would be very convenient to store the
information somewhere. A server in the middle _just works_. The primary reason
not to use a server is because there is an inherent disadvantage/distrust in a
central authority (à la Bitcoin). Apparently for social networks this is not
an issue for 99.9% of people.

~~~
EGreg
But why do we HAVE to use the servers at facebook as the server in the middle

"pubsubhubbub" as a protocol would let you choose your "hub"

in general, any publisher of information could designate one or more computers
to store the data redundantly, and even encrypt it so that only my friends
with the key can decrypt it.

that's how the web works btw

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pelario
> The app ecosystem is like nature’s ecosystem – where innumerable species
> evolve and thrive, and that is the best that could happen for users. We need
> a rich ecosystem comprising of multiple species – read startups – that can
> lead to further evolution – read innovation – than just a few predatory
> monsters.

I wonder how much of wishful thinkin is in the article. The claimed fact that
there is no dominant actor yet does not grant that this not going to happend,
like "In the desktop world".

I remember reading the same kind of idealistic descriptions about the internet
about 15 years ago, and now it is dominated by the giants.

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evgen
Agreed, completely delusional wishful thinking. There is some innovation and
"unbundling" at the edges, and then once those edges become reasonably well
defined and there is a verifiable market there the majors will swoop in, build
a couple of clones or additions to their platforms and hoover up a couple of
the larger apps. And the cycle will continue. Every once in a while one of
these major players at the edge will grow big at a fast enough rate that it
will achieve orbital velocity and become a major in its own right by owning
the new hotness for long enough to become a utility (cf. Netscape, Yahoo,
Google, Facebook, etc.) but the idea that this there is any sort of major
change in progress seems somewhat detached from the facts on the ground.

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golemotron
It's never been clear what FB will do with the integration of messenger in the
browser. So much for unbundling that one.

~~~
mvp
I think messenger works very well on mobile, which somehow I see most people
use for actual messaging.

