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:4, Interesting)
All true, but things get harder and harder as the user bases in question grow. Geocities used to popular for example, but it's user base never encountered anything remotely resembling what Facebook currently has. It's the digital equivalent of inertia.
Re:While I admire their goals... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Social networks (Score:4, Interesting)
The main reason Friendster died-off was because it couldn't scale up. After it hit a certain level of popularity, you couldn't even visit the site without it spewing MySQL errors or hanging for a minute on every page load. Meanwhile, they launched some half-baked plan to rewrite the whole thing in Java, while people were bailing from the site out of frustration.
The other interesting thing about Friendster was the "friend-of-a-friend" privacy model. Which means if you weren't somehow connected to the active userbase, it did seem like a ghost town. That sort of model has its advantages, but it did limit network effects and probably accelerated the hipster effect of becoming too popular.
Re:Social networks (Score:5, Interesting)
Then again, MySpace did have a userbase comparable to Facebook. And yet it seems to have gone from being the the place to be to "are you still on myspace?" in a very short space of time.
If social networks function in the same way as (say) eBay, then you'd be right. In that case the size of the user base is itself a resource that draws in more users. But suppose there's a different dynamic at work. Suppose it functions like a fashion accessory. Then users could prove a lot more fickle that you'd expect.
A lot of the people driving adoption for new networks are kids. Then the parents follow so they can keep an eye on the children. Before long everyone's on the new network, and aside from a few die-hards, no-one wants to be seen dead on the old sites. And then the kids start looking for a place to hang out that their mums don't know about, and a new generation is coming up that doesn't want anything to do with what their big sister thinks is cool...
I could be wrong, of course. But it would explain why none of the previous social networks have managed translate users into longevity.
Re:Social networks (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting - OneSocialWeb looks like it has some promise to me. StatusNet seems like it's aimed at a somewhat different role, though it clearly exists already, and I see that there's overlap.
OneSocialWeb needs to make sampling easy - open source is great, but just proclaiming the potential benefits and sticking up source code on a website isn't going to draw people, even geeky people like me, in. This is all still too early or too feature-incomplete to say "here it is, don't bother Diaspora guys, it's already been done".
I realize OneSocialWeb is alpha at this point, but installing your own XMPP server etc. is a relatively high hurdle for setting up an online community.
It has to be easy to try out joining a community AND easy to set up your own community that links into the overall social network if you want to attract even the early adopter types who will then contribute back code and features to the community. The first "open social web" project to hit that critical mass point will probably get some real traction.
Re:I've seen something like that recently... (Score:4, Interesting)
ctd.
This is why distributed approaches like Diaspora/Retroshare/... will fail:
- You have a problem publishing new versions of the software. You can't force new versions out, there will be incompatibilities between nodes, things will not 'just work'.
- Privacy aside, you don't add value that Facebook hasn't.
- Quality of the service: The development team or community will not provide a continuous, mature program version.
* unless they have some business model on how to generate revenue from it.
- No inspiration, or higher goal they strive to. They just do something existing a little bit better. But there is nothing fundamental about why one should use the new service. It is better in features, it is logical to use it. But that is not satisfactory.
- Original developers will at some point stop maintaining the project, and not have gained enough other developers around them that continue development, maintenance and infrastructure on a high quality level.
Please, Diaspora* team, prove me wrong. Read this and prove me wrong.
If you can't, it is not the fault of your expertise, or skills as a programmer or software engineer. There is just more to it than developing a superior product.
Who is everyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because first you did indeed host your own site, but YOU were a university or other large institution as they were the only ones to have access to the net.
If you mean the unwashed masses with everyone then the first hosting was the home page, provided by your ISP.
Geocities and the like came after that, when ISP's turned more towards low-cost and provided to little flexibility or capacity.
Next up was the blog, the home-page re-invented.
Myspace took a look in.
I think that with ip6 we might actually indeed get something like Opera's unite instead. I already use the same Opera thanks to its sync feature, why not host my profile from my web browser as well and people connecting to my own router which has its own IP and can be reached by anyone? The next facebook would possibly not host the content, but index it instead. It would allow far more freedom as to how you publish information, but also make it less standarized.
Basically, since you list is far longer, it seems we get something new, or something old in a new coat, every couple of years. So presumably the perfect method has not yet been found.
Re:Social networks (Score:2, Interesting)
You really need to read the article.
You'll host your data on your server, so there'll be no p2p stuff going on on dynamic IPs. It's p2p between servers, not in the same way bittorrent works.
This is the real problem they need to solve - how non-techies can get set up. But presumably you'll be able to have 3rd parties providing hosting like with wordpress.
Re:Social networks (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't "convince them" you tell them that's where they can find the latest photos of last weekend, their wedding, their grandkids, you, etc. If they want to see them, they get an account.
Not saying they haven't already thought of it, but if they were smart they'd add a google calendar/evite type 'event' planner where all you need is an e-mail account, not a Diaspora account.
The thing they need most is a name that's not "diaspora" the streak of horribly named open source projects continued.
Re:Social networks (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no opinion about the merits or demerits of Diaspora, but forums (fora?) thrive or survive on what fills a given purpose at a given time. Take Slashdot, for instance. This is focused towards those of us with what is essentially a 1990s mindset, with marginal respect paid to the thrills and spills of the so-called "Web 2.0" junk peddled by other sites.
Facebook is for now the leader among these fora, since it ostensibly offers many people (I am not among their number) the kind of connectivity that they seem to want right now. But nobody should be surprised if Facebook gets supplanted by something else if it becomes seen to be lacking in something (e.g. security or privacy safeguards) regarded as necessary. It's all part of the normal rise and fall of eminence in software (as in other things). Evolution happens online just as much as in meat-space.
Re:Social networks (Score:2, Interesting)
P2P is a unnecessary. Federated servers would be good enough. Right now, you can set up your own Jabber server and talk to GTalk users, so people who want independence can have it, but the people who aren't familiar with computers can just get a Google account.
Federation (S2S) is a win for everyone. P2P is much more difficult to create and has few benefits.
Privacy Models vs. Flexibility in Social networks (Score:3, Interesting)
The real trick here is how they build the communications and privacy models - how much data is open, how do they share it, what can you do with it - and how that affects what kinds of features you can build using it. You could build something like Livejournal on a pretty tight system with no central data storage, but it'd be harder to find your ex-girlfriend's cousin's third-grade-teacher's dog's picture and send it a cute icon of a fire hydrant. Or if you build a system that's really good at both of those, then you'll have tradeoffs in how much data you have to ship around, so your DSL connection is 98% full of encrypted packets for your friends' friends' friends' searches, and your query gets you a dialog box about "your posting may cost the net hundreds or thousands of dollars."
And that flexibility is important, not only for the kinds of marketing people who want to monetize everything, but also for the people who want to maintain the community and keep all of those users around and interested, as opposed to having them disappear like Friendster or Orkut users who had their fifteen minutes of fame and six months of friend invitations from cute guys in Brazil. Livejournal seems to be doing ok with it, but Facebook gets a lot of social involvement out of all of that Farmville and Mafia Wars stuff, and the question becomes how to facilitate the social networking effects of it without also the mass information-leakage.