Creating a Better Facebook 295
Fed up with Facebook's insatiable need to continue to expose your personal information to ever widening circles, four NYU students have decided to build an open source, distributed competitor to the social networking behemoth. They've raised a few grand, but I imagine it will be harder to convince your mom to log in.
Re:Social networks (Score:2, Informative)
Likewise, a single server that says "Here are a couple people online, go talk to them to connect to the network" is far better than a centralized server that says "Here's all your data, and your friends data. Oh, and I'm giving your data away in large quantities."
"it will be harder to convince your mom to log in" (Score:4, Informative)
That's a bad thing?
This Easter I was BSing with the various family members after dinner. And my sister started getting on my teenage niece's case about some boy on her Facebook page and the teen-related shenanigans mentioned. Minor shit -- a kiss.
I finally looked at my sister and asked her if she recalled being that age. I recall my sister at that age, and let's just say our mom would have been elated if she could have kept her activities down to raunchy (as opposed to nasty).
Teens need liberated from Facebook. No one needs their goddamned parents breathing down their neck just because last night their boyfriend was breathing down their neck.
gnu social and friends (Score:4, Informative)
There are quite a few projects to create this:
http://www.elgg.org/ [elgg.org] though it is not distributed (they are working on it)
http://onesocialweb.org/ [onesocialweb.org] is xmpp based, i have set up my own instance.
http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social [fsf.org] has just started and is a gnu project.
There are some standards to help this kind of thing but most are not complete.
you may want to look into foaf for storing a social graph for example.
Please chat with other people if you find this interesting.
IRC chat: #social on freenode
How is this different than Drupal? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Social networks (Score:2, Informative)
I realize that more has to be done to StatusNet than to XMPP to make a usable social network, and that they come at it from different angles, but both have key pieces already in place -- federation (which is hard), security, status, profiles, and plug-ins -- so I think either could be taken to the Facebook point with much less effort than starting a new project.
I especially like the XMPP route because some providers already offer this service, and that means more leverage over FB. For example, GMail already offers both XMPP (GTalk) and Buzz, so adapting to the OpenSocial API would be fairly easy. Yahoo! will have more trouble, but it may find itself squeezed out of the webmail business if Y! doesn't make a move and FB continues to push into that market.
Re:Social networks (Score:2, Informative)
People who can't manage their facebook privacy settings are certainly not going to be able to manage profile replication and multiple privacy policies. Oh, but they can audit the source code :rolleyes:.
Oh please. The whole thing is encrypted with GPG. It doesn't matter who has the data, as long as they can't read it.
Re:Social networks (Score:2, Informative)
They way I understand it, when you "friend" someone, you're giving them a key to unlock a certain part of the profile.
Perhaps you're just confused by Facebook's "everyone sees everything" privacy model. ;)
Re:Dirty Unix Joke (Score:2, Informative)