

Is it Too Late For an Open Source Challenge to Facebook? - Garbage
http://ostatic.com/blog/is-it-too-late-for-an-open-source-challenge-to-facebook

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dandrews
About a year ago a friend encouraged me to sign up for FB. "Facebook?" I
grumbled, "Isn't that the New AOL?" My pal persisted, saying it really was a
good way to keep up with what the kids were doing.

So I signed up, found that indeed it was a good way to find long-lost pals
from my misspent youth. But other than that it was pretty much a wasteland -
stupid games and crap.

Zuck's privacy policies were troubling as well. So I tightened everything down
as much as possible, contributed little, and monitored the "recent news" feed
once every week or two.

What do I get from FB? Mostly simply the ability to find people; it's the
closest thing to an internet phone book. You're better off searching FB for an
odd acquaintance than you are Googling him.

But outside of that, email works fine for me. All I need is a "white pages"
service. So I'd suggest that what the FOSS community should provide is exactly
that, just a white pages registry. Put your real name and email address in and
await queries from the registry: "Do you know John Doe? He's asked for your
email address."

Such a registry would block mass requests, or only allow so many queries a
month with more than a degree or two of separation from your existing
acquaintances.

Someone here start that up, okay?

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makecheck
I think it's a lot like the Microsoft Office problem: for a long time it was
hard to get data out, everyone you knew was using it, and significant
mindshare and investment had been built on top of the original solution.

OpenOffice proved that it's possible to break free, but change may come at a
glacial pace.

Competitors need a push-button way to get data out of Facebook, they need to
match most features, and they need to be free. And, they either have to
convince 30 of your friends to switch, or make sure that you can still
interact with them perfectly if they choose to stay on Facebook.

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wladimir
I certainly hope it is not too late. At least I hope for an open, distributed
system. "open source" is not the thing that is important here, Example:
E-mail. Many E-mail clients and servers are not open source. But the protocol
is open and well-documented which means open-source and closed-source can
interoperate without any problems.

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jdp23
of course it's not too late. silly title. i agree with the conclusion though:

"It would be an outstanding thing to see an open platform challenge the
Facebooks of the world. Without a doubt, smart purveyors of such a platform
could leverage the openness, and potentially win users over with it. That idea
already prompted our post "Why Does FOSS Development Lag the Innovation
Curve?" The funny thing is, though, even though open source platforms and
applications compete in so many other application categories, there is almost
no real competition from the open source community in the social networking
space. That needs to change."

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foljs
Hmm, do we ever had any Open Source "answer" to anything succeed, not in the
meaning of usefulness, but in the meaning of BEING ACTUALLY USED BY A HUGE
NUMBER OF PEOPLE, something that is necessary for, say, Facebook?

Compare:

@ Linux, _BSD - > Windows, OS X @ ogg -> mp3 @ Theora -> H264, @ Gimp ->
Photoshop, @ Open Office -> MS Office, @ Mono -> Windows .NET CLR, @ GNUStep
-> Cocoa,

The only exceptions I can think of are Firefox/Webkit (still lagging behind
IE_, though).

In the server side, of course, it's different: Apache, Bind, MySQL, PHP,
etc...

~~~
wladimir
How do you define "succeed"? Does something only succeed if it has the largest
market share?

Anyway, Linux has certainly succeeded. In the server and embedded realm it is
used a lot.

If you can't find more exceptions you're simply not looking well enough. There
are many other exceptions: Wikipedia is open source. And don't forget OSX is
based on an open source kernel.

In databases many open source products are used. BerkelyDB is used a lot in
applications, so is MySQL in web applications.

Many tools used regularly by developers are open source.

~~~
foljs
"How do you define "succeed"? Does something only succeed if it has the
largest market share?" -- no: mainly if it's better suited to the task at
hand.

"There are many other exceptions: Wikipedia is open source."

Which doesn't matter at all, the success of Wikipedia is in the content and
the participation of the content creators, not in the open source-ness of the
underlying wiki engine.

"And don't forget OSX is based on an open source kernel."

I don't. But that has nothing to do with the success of OS X. Darwin itself
never got anywhere.

"Many tools used regularly by developers are open source."

Yes --but those are not replications of existing closed source ones...

