

Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives - michaelchisari
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/25/onesocialweb-appleseed-elgg-insoshi/

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bmurphy
There are no Facebook alernatives. My friends and family are on Facebook. They
are not on ANYTHING else. Until that changes, which I suspect it won't,
nothing else will be viable.

~~~
michaelchisari
For now, yes. But the history of the Internet is one of distributed solutions
winning out over proprietary walled gardens.

For instance, a lot of people are on niche or community-driven social
networking sites, alongside facebook. If those sites could communicate with
each other, facebook would lose a lot of mind share.

~~~
bmurphy
You're right. But it's not happening now. I don't see it. Who are the
alternatives everybody is flocking to? They don't exist.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hopeful for a new world of open protocols and you
controlling your own data, but I just don't see it happening right now.

~~~
michaelchisari
True, but we're still in the construction phase, which I of course find very
exciting, but I realize it can be frustrating for people who might want a
viable facebook alternative right now.

I do think it's an inevitability, and it's really just a matter of how soon it
happens. Mark my words though, within at least 5-10 years from now, Facebook
will look more like the AOL of social networking.

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michaelchisari
For reference, here is a screenshot of my Appleseed newsfeed:

<http://goo.gl/RjD3f>

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c1utch
Although I am cheering for every Facebook alternative, the UI in your
screenshot needs work.

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michaelchisari
What do you suggest? Often people take issue with the color scheme, which is
understandable, a default theme for an open source project needs to find a
reasonable balance between good enough to use and ugly enough that people want
to change it. It's important that people have the desire to "brand" their
node, so as to avoid confusion.

Appleseed is fully themable using CSS, and keeps a clear separation between
logic and presentation, so any designer can make it look any way they'd like.

However, if you're speaking more to the actual user interface, I'd be very
interested to hear your thoughts on what you find to be an issue.

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joe_the_user
The screen-shot looks OK to me but I'm not a professional designer - the only
thing that occurs to me is that div-sizes might be slightly awkward or the
type might be a bit small.

One problem with any Facebook alternative where you have just one "reference
application" implemented is that people will glance at the page and judge it
by looks regardless of how configurable it is. That's a problem with any UI
sadly enough.

I guess that's why I like the idea of creating layers and protocols to allow
easy, multiple implementations. IE, my idea of five minutes ago - plugins for
Drupal, Wordpress and Phpbb to ties multiple sites into a single large social
network. The issue of design might then not be front-and-center.

~~~
michaelchisari
Actually, Appleseed's framework abstracts out the user-facing code into a
"foundation", which can be removed and replaced (and even inherited) without
changing any of the underlying server-side logic.

So there's no reason I couldn't implement a radically different UI like this
without changing any of the base code. Theoretically, you would even be able
to switch between the UI's with a simple button.

[http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Facebook-Facelift-Home-
Profil...](http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Facebook-Facelift-Home-Profiles-
_amp-Publisher/314489)

~~~
joe_the_user
How does the foundation talk to the server?

Do you have to use php?

~~~
michaelchisari
If you wanted to build a new foundation, you'd do it in client-side
JavaScript. You communicate with the server through a REST API.

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joe_the_user
Have a link describing the REST API?

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michaelchisari
Not yet, actually, it's still in flux, and documentation is sparse to non-
existant. The next few releases will be ironing out a lot of the
implementation, and I'm going to prioritize a guide for how to get started
with it.

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joe_the_user
The approach of OneSocialWeb seems to be to define and extend existing
standard protocols. This general direction seems appealing to me but in
anycase, it's one extreme of possible approaches.

With Elgg or Insoshi, a "social networking engine" isn't particularly
different from a generic CMS. In this sense, Drupal might be the leading
alternative to Facebook, since it's dominant in its field (you could argue for
wordpress too). And maybe that's an idea. An alternative to Facebook is to add
a protocol to several common CMSes that would let you aggregate you friend's
posts - Tie-together all the world's BBSes into a bullwork against Facebook.
Anyway, a pure CMS where you sort the protocol later is the other extreme of
approaches.

Appleseed and Diaspora seem somewhat in the middle of these approaches. They
sort-of have protocols but don't seem to be protocol driven.

~~~
michaelchisari
Appleseed is built to be protocol agnostic. It abstracts out the protocol to a
series of event triggers/hooks. It can even juggle multiple protocols at the
same time.

This was a deliberate decision, because we're still waiting to see which
protocol will win out, so once that happens, by design, it's much more trivial
to move Appleseed over to that protocol in a seamless way than other similar
projects.

~~~
joe_the_user
Which protocols are you testing? Which do you like?

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michaelchisari
Internally, it uses a custom protocol, which allows me to tweak it easily for
my needs. The one I'm keeping my eye on is OStatus, and that's definitely the
biggest possibility for what I'd switch to.

Although I like XMPP in theory, the requirement of running an XMPP server
conflicts with Appleseed's requirement of being able to run on a vanilla
shared host with no root access.

