
Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative - pinstriped_dude
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/
======
alanh
> I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

> I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

> I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world
> knowing. Cannot.

Great examples of what Facebook cannot do, and what the Facebook replacement
must do.

~~~
thingie
I wonder how could any Facebook replacement (or Facebook itself) allow
somebody to support some group while not telling anyone. Of course it's
possible, donate some money, do some job for them, but… on Facebook or
something like Facebook? How?

~~~
sounddust
Facebook itself used to have this level of privacy protection. You could join
a group and post on the wall and in the forums for that group privately. If
your privacy settings were to disallow non-friends from seeing your profile,
then it would just show your first name and a generic placeholder as your
photo. Your name would be unclickable and therefore untraceable to you unless
you had a unique first name.

Ironically, right before the big push to erode users' privacy, it seemed that
they might have taken it a step further and replaced your name with "facebook
user", removing even your first name (I was never sure if this was intentional
or a bug, but in any case it didn't last long as the big privacy changes came
soon after).

~~~
gaius
The thing is, this doesn't even make sense for FB to do. I've removed my
interests and activities from my profile. Before the ads I got shown were
basically relevant - they were mainly for products and services connected to
those sports I listed, for example. Now the ads I get shown are fairly random.
So Facebook have reduced my value to them as a set of eyeballs to show ads to.
How can anyone at FB have thought this was a good idea?

~~~
krschultz
I've done the same thing as you and noticed the same effect on the ads shown
to me, but when I mentioned my privacy concerns to some friends the other
night, most just said "so what, I don't have much of value on Facebook
anyway". I think the mass of people (even intelligent people) don't have the
same privacy concerns as a lot of the "tech informed" crowd does.

We know how valuable the data is and what can be done with it, that makes us
much more sensitive to giving it up.

------
rmundo
What I'd like is distributed p2p linking. No personal data on a server that
isn't yours. Any of your data hosted on a third party site if you choose so,
is encrypted to within an inch of its life: they can't do ANYTHING with it
except forward it to whoever you designate.

Venn diagrams for your social graph. Or trees. Preferably both. If
Yelp/Microsoft/whoever wants my data, they become a member of my social graph,
not some all-seeing entity that hovers above me recording every comment I
make. Data that goes to them is encrypted as well of course.

Make it distributed, because no company hosting user data will be able to
resist the temptation to use it to make money. Or build it on top of Dropbox,
and have Dropbox serve as the backup for your online social life, encrypted,
of course. 2GB will eventually fill up, and hopefully people will be happy to
pay for extra storage, especially if you make it easy.

~~~
cookiecaper
I have a comment further down mentioning the horrendous mess that a P2P
architecture would present.

It would work for techies like us, but it wouldn't work for the segment that
is making Facebook so transcendently popular. MySpace was a "teen" thing,
others before it, too, but Facebook is mainstream; my grandma has a profile,
my parents have profiles, and such is true of many.

Also mainstream is turning off your computer when you're not using it. Almost
every non-techie I know is really interested in having their computer turned
off. They don't really care about waiting for it to come back up. Telling them
that their profile is only accessible while their computer is on is an instant
killer. And what if their internet goes out? They're down for that time too.
For people with spotty or wireless connections, saying "your profile will only
work when your connection works, like 30% of the time", is not going to be too
encouraging.

What if a user's hard drive dies? Do you really expect people like my 86-year-
old grandmother to make backups of her social network profile frequently
enough for it to be meaningful? Or what if a user just gets a new computer?
Are they going to understand how to transfer the profile?

Making users download and run a P2P server 24/7 slows down the computer,
increases personal connection bandwidth usage commensurate with one's
popularity, and creates a big opening for scammers.

I know Facebook would be much less enjoyable if I had to sit around and wait
for the dial-up AOL connections of the old people I know to upload their
photos. Or even home broadband connections; in the US, those are usually
capped at 60-70kbps upload, which is pretty slow.

How easy would it be to create a page that looks like your network's page and
say "We've updated our client! This is a special update that we can't auto-
update for these smart-sounding technical reasons, so please download and
install it." People would do this immediately because social networks are a
major part of their web usage; for some, the only reason they use computer.
And your network would be poisoned and the users' profile disabled just that
easily.

I just don't see how a P2P social network would gain mainstream appeal. What
are your solutions to these problems?

~~~
wmf
This is why your "peer" should be a cloud server, not a PC. Call it S2S
architecture.

~~~
cookiecaper
Right, but then you still have all of your data off somewhere in someone
else's control. It'd possibly even be worse than Facebook, because an open
"provider" that doesn't do anything except host data for Facebook & co.
wouldn't be bringing any revenue, and thus would be tempted just to sell all
the data you upload.

The point shouldn't be to cut out Facebook, it should be to keep the user in
complete control of their data. You can transfer control to an arbitrary
entity but what are they going to do to make money, and are they going to
become corrupt or not? And if you asked yourself the same thing about
Zuckerberg the day after Thefacebook went online, what would your answer be?

~~~
wmf
Obviously you can only trust a server if you pay for it and have a good
contract. It's like an apartment or a safe deposit box.

~~~
cookiecaper
And how many are going to pay for server space when you say "this is like
Facebook, but more secure", and how many are just going to stick with
Facebook?

~~~
wmf
IMO people deserve as much privacy as they're willing to pay for. If some
people choose to stick with Facebook, that's not my problem.

------
tjstankus
I love that there's a Facebook Like widget in the right column as you scroll
down.

~~~
rsl7
metalike!

------
Detrus
Yea let's get an open alternative, a few years of coding, a few years of
Facebook screwing up, a massive hatefest, and it will have 30% penetration in
2018. By then there will be new technologies that will make the issue
irrelevant.

Same as Linux and Firefox. By the time the community effort got it together,
most of the effort was obsolete. Google's Chrome OS throws much of linux away.
NativeClient sandboxing turns browsers and plugins into frameworks of choice,
like jQuery.

There has to be a more efficient way.

~~~
mahmud
FWIW, I have written a facebook clone in Common Lisp and took me 2 months. It
has profile pages, a platform for 3rd party apps, elaborate RBAC-based
security, and a rudimentary service API.

If anybody wants to take this in some direction, I am more than happy to come
aboard.

~~~
darko
is there anyway we can take a look at it?

~~~
mahmud
Anybody who sent me an email gets a preview after I clean it up in a week.

------
Alex3917
"It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace
it with something open and distributed."

Before Facebook there was FOAF, which was exactly the same except for that it
was open and distributed... And nobody used it. Being closed is the only thing
that makes Facebook good.

~~~
derefr
Presenting itself initially as Harvard's yearbook is what made it good, as it
kickstarted its network effects (everyone feels sort of obligated to be "in
the yearbook," because they want to imagine they will be reminisced about.)
I've seen FOAF profiles, but I've never seen a FOAF _network_.

~~~
Alex3917
"I've seen FOAF profiles, but I've never seen a FOAF network."

Yeah, because no one is going to give 700 million dollars to a bunch of
hippies to make some internet commune.

------
TrevorBramble
A guy I know has been working on something of the sort for awhile. I'm sure
he'd appreciate some thoughtful input from enlightened beings such as
yourselves. =^)

<http://socknet.net/w/The_Socknet>

------
aquinn
<http://onesocialweb.org>

------
Keyframe
What facebook is for anyways? Why should anyone care? I find it becoming more
and more boring, useless - and, from my experience, people tend to go there
less and less.

\- Photos here and there

\- Random links/videos scooped around the net

\- Rants/statuses nobody cares about

\- Passive activism where people "join a group"/like something and do nothing
about it

\- Farmville

It is boring, really. I found twitter, recently, of immense use in two fields.
First, around the industry bunch of professionals connected themselves even
without knowing each other beforehand and openly discussing stuff and sharing
ideas. (notably game dev). Also, have you seen stocktwits? If they can find a
system to filter out the noise... excellent! I have an idea though, if they
could somehow pool calls from regular users and "analysts" and compare them to
a weighted random generator and post stats next to each user that would be
great.

------
jasonlbaptiste
facebook is now opt-out whereas it used to be opt-in. give me something like
that with early 2006 facebook simplicity and id try it. ironically, ive always
wanted a higher res community for the people here on HN. this might be the
perfect seeding grounds for something to happen (early adopter, good sense of
community, far reach,etc.)

------
Dauntless
I think a good idea for a new Facebook would be to start at some big
University college and build up from there...

------
ghb
I'm curious as to why lifestreaming never caught on: why entrust all your data
to a single service (Facebook) when you can entrust specific data to specific
services (photos to flickr, status to twitter, bookmarks to delicious, etc).
This fragmentation produces specific competition for hosting particular data
(this is already the case: Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa etc) which should keep
hosts fresh and honest as they don't want to lose users.

All lifestreaming did was aggregate all of this into a discoverable point with
privacy controls.

What happened?

------
snewe
Can someone show evidence of this statement?

"Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great
idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook
page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your
post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show
up on the FBI or CIA page."

That is scary.

~~~
kmavm
Facebook has had stream search for public status messages since July of 2009.
Stream search is privacy-neutral; it only lets you see posts you were already
allowed to see.

If you don't want your status messages to be visible to everyone, set your
privacy settings accordingly. Account -> Privacy Settings -> Personal
Information and Posts and adjust the "Posts by Me" setting to whatever you
like.

------
lukeqsee
I am going to work on a new implementation of a facebook style website. Built
on these core values: 1) User privacy 2) Data transferability 3) Open source
software 4) Open API (for only that data that users allow, of course.)

I plan to do it in a Python web framework, most likely Django.

I know people have been discussing a distributed social network, but I don't
see a market for that among the non-techies of the world. Just like they see
XMPP as gMail chat (most of them), open standards mean nothing. Just look at
openID, it simply can't gain much traction -- unless a flag carrier picks it
up. Distributed social networking will simply splinter the arena till it's
impossible for them to know "which one?"

For a new social network, the users want: 1) Simplicity. 2) Privacy. 3)
Interaction. 4) Rich but intuitive interfaces.

I am making a call for any interested devs, shoot me an email.
lukeseelenbinder <at> the only webmail provider to use. :)

(If I should post this as a new post. Let me know. I'm a little new to HN)

~~~
nkassis
Glad that you're a hotmail user, oh wait that's not you ...

------
cookiecaper
I've been thinking about doing some kind of distributed/open social network
thing what with all the Facebook scandals cropping up, but it's pretty hard to
do.

The fact is for something like Facebook to function smoothly, it has to be
centralized. There has to be a server somewhere out there that can be queried
reliably for this data and that's the bottom line, even if you have something
API-based like OpenSocial. It's just a matter of who you're going to trust
with that data -- and as we see over and over again, money and power clouds
judgment; a good candidate to control this network when it's starting out may
not hold up so well under the barrages of billions in revenue and investors
down the neck.

The only way for users to have real control over their data is to build some
P2P/self-hosting architecture, and for reasons all HN readers understand, this
would be a huge, huge mess.

~~~
Todd
At first glance it seems nontrivial. As with most problems like this that can
be decomposed into algorithms and datastructures, technology provides a
solution. OpenID, OAuth, and Open Social were all developed to solve similar
problems.

My guess is that there will be half a dozen competing protocols within a year.

~~~
cookiecaper
Right, and how successful are those protocols you've named? They all have
relatively limited deployment and usage even though they've been around for
years. OpenID is a nice idea but people don't want to remember a URL and a
username and a password. People don't want to remember a "master URL" to give
to each new social app they sign up for -- they want what Facebook gives; just
sign up with a traditional username and password and start finding your
friends immediately.

And, again, even then, if we follow the OpenID model of external providers,
it's all about trusting that external provider with your data. There's still a
central point with your data on it. There has to be. Unless the user is self-
hosting this data, there is always a reliance on external entities. And how
long could an external provider survive merely as a host for applications like
Facebook, while not pulling in any revenue from Facebook's revenue channels
like ads or Credits?

------
silas
Might be a fun project to implement the XMPP Microblogging XEP
(<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html>) as a start. XMPP seems to have a
lot of the basic features for a distributed social network (buddy list,
pubsub, established protocol, etc...)

------
bootload
_"... It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people
control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be
turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services
can flourish ..."_

That is an interesting thought. Eben Moglin, _"Freedom vs. The Cloud Log"_ ~
[http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben-
Moglen-...](http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben-Moglen-
Freedom-vs-the-Cloud-Log-955421.html) has a solution. A small web server where
you control the logs and content, "do-able".

------
roamzero
Is there some sort of metric out there that quantifies the number or
percentage of people that care enough about privacy to drop out of Facebook in
disgust? What if FB is right and most people don't care about comprehensive
privacy features? It may simply be enough for FB to keep random stalkers and
identity thieves away. It's easy to imagine that the Ebay effect will stick to
FB and it'll be the only heavyweight social network site around for some time.

------
dangrover
"Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great
idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook
page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your
post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show
up on the FBI or CIA page."

Is this really true, or is the author conflating updates with the newly-
normalized interests fields?

~~~
raganwald
Here's the page for the "Legos" interest:

[http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Legos/110234219005966?ref=t...](http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Legos/110234219005966?ref=ts)

Take a look at the "Related Global Posts" list below. You'll see lots of stuff
from people who don't list lego in their interests fields.

The question I have is whether posts still show up if your status updates are
hidden to people who are not friends or friends of friends.

------
mambodog
It's funny seeing this article a day or two after seeing an article about
Diaspora.

------
baran
Listened to a talk given by one of the Firefox guys a while back and in their
vision social networking would be aggregated into the browser. Seems like a
good start for this open alternative.

~~~
ff0066mote
I've noticed a trend recently whereby social networking sites on the internet
are becoming integrated into desktop applications, panel applets, and now you
suggest integrating it into my browser?

Personally, I like keeping my online social identity sandboxed away in my
browser, in a tab. If it's integrated into my browser's code, then it's harder
to understand how my privacy works.

In the current situation, I just have to clear my cookies to ensure my privacy
is secure.

I'm _not_ enthusiastic about a future where my browser has the functionality
of _specific web services_ built into it.

------
malloreon
Through this article I found out that Facebook has a "Chief Privacy Officer."
That made me giggle.

How long till CPO Chris Kelly's job is obsolesced by the utter lack of privacy
on FB?

~~~
kksm19820117
A la Piers Anthony: The function of the Chief Privacy Officer is to ensure
that there is no privacy.

------
noisedom
If a open facebook clone is released that gets all the bands off of myspace
and onto the clone then I think you'll have a winner.

------
sliverstorm
My take: ignore the hype, watch people freak out and run around, and if it
turns out it is a truly bad apple, pull out when I know for sure.

Not because I have a vested interest in them, but I don't have any info I need
to keep private (I make sure of this) and I am not one to buy into hype and
running around with your hands in the air.

Go ahead, downvote me for not being a Facebook alarmist. I do apologize though
if I put it too curtly.

------
stickhandle
Don't get the fuss ... live by this rule -- DON"T PUT SENSITIVE INFO ON THE
INTERNET. Simple. Be smart. Know what it is and isn't. Even if FBook had more
enforced rules, then hackers would be the issue. As for FBook using the info
you give it ... well, that's just good business.

------
iamdave
I think that there should be a push to build upon the idea of using XHTML
markup to create a distributed social network.

Formally known as XFN?

~~~
cracki
why do you single out XHTML? a markup language is not relevant to the problem.

besides, XHTML never caught on. otoh, HTML5 is doing great.

------
benmathes
<http://www.linkedin.com/companies/enole>

------
c00p3r
No way. You cannot attract so many people worldwide when the trend is already
mature. The same with other mass hysterias like WoW, now the iPad, etc.

The Tipping Point is a good book to learn why not. In-browser social networks
is a not a cool thing anymore. It is just some feature of the net.

What is really interesting - is an emerging market of the Android-powered
devices. The hardware is powerful and cheap enough, and the platform is open
and simple (unlike the Nokia's crap).

The next generation of the social communications should be something like
"texting 2.0" - texting with easy integration of a rich content from phone's
camera on the fly. Just because teens loves texting, taking photos and their
mobile phones.

~~~
Nagyman
A thousand times yes. I just made the same comment not 2 days ago on reddit.
The next social networks are an extension of our mobile network which already
exist. My only concern is that I don't trust carriers any more than facebook.
And I don't want to pay per message. So an open system is paramount ... And
doing it before a Closed business gains the most marketshare in that space.

------
bartl
I think it's actually time that FaceBook got shut down. By law.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
On what legal basis? It's just a website that you can use if you like. I think
Facebook is actually very useful because they are so openly nasty,
disrespectful and deceptive. Their users are, on average, so incredibly
negligent and clueless that the whole thing will blow up in society's face
eventually, and then much better sites (maybe even a reformed Facebook) will
emerge.

~~~
hga
Indeed; I don't see their having done anything that rises to the level where
an execution by the government is warranted. If they get slapped around some
more by the FTC that will become even less likely.

One good thing that might come out of this is some "rules of the road" on
changing ToS when they also change the social contract under which people
entered their personal data.

------
aarlo
It doesn't matter what's right or wrong, or what we want! 5% of users know or
care about privacy. And social networking services are all about the network
effect. So, good luck competing. Facebook won.

------
AgileCyborg
Facebook is for cheap-ass squares. They will get the biggest bang for the non-
existent buck with FB.

It is only the deviant evil bastards such as myself who steer clear of the
site: the atheist in a sea of believers, the swinger in an ocean of
conventional marrieds, the Libertarian government critic in a swirl of FBI and
CIA FB meddling, the gay-rights supporter in a community of homophobes...
Damn, and this is just the beginning.

Free isn't necessarily freedom which is why I tend to be doubly-cautious
around it.

------
andrewvc
Ugh. Another FB article.

When the revolution comes, the spark that lights the fire won't come from
Hacker News.

/me goes off to find a greasemonkey script to drop FB articles.

