Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

&#62; I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.<p>&#62; I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.<p>&#62; I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.<p>Great examples of what Facebook cannot do, and what the Facebook replacement must do.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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.<p>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.<p>There has to be a more efficient way.

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

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. =^)<p><a href="http://socknet.net/w/The_Socknet" rel="nofollow">http://socknet.net/w/The_Socknet</a>

<a href="http://onesocialweb.org" rel="nofollow">http://onesocialweb.org</a>

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.<p>- Photos here and there<p>- Random links/videos scooped around the net<p>- Rants/statuses nobody cares about<p>- Passive activism where people "join a group"/like something and do nothing about it<p>- Farmville<p>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.

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.)

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

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.<p>All lifestreaming did was aggregate all of this into a discoverable point with privacy controls.<p>What happened?

Can someone show evidence of this statement?<p>"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."<p>That is scary.

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.)<p>I plan to do it in a Python web framework, most likely Django.<p>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?"<p>For a new social network, the users want: 1) Simplicity. 2) Privacy. 3) Interaction. 4) Rich but intuitive interfaces.<p>I am making a call for any interested devs, shoot me an email. lukeseelenbinder &#60;at&#62; the only webmail provider to use. :)<p>(If I should post this as a new post. Let me know. I'm a little new to HN)

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

<i>"... 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 ..."</i><p>That is an interesting thought. Eben Moglin, <i>"Freedom vs. The Cloud Log"</i> ~ <a href="http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben-Moglen-Freedom-vs-the-Cloud-Log-955421.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben-Moglen-...</a> has a solution. A small web server where you control the logs and content, "do-able".

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.

"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."<p>Is this really true, or is the author conflating updates with the newly-normalized interests fields?

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

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.

Through this article I found out that Facebook has a "Chief Privacy Officer." That made me giggle.<p>How long till CPO Chris Kelly's job is obsolesced by the utter lack of privacy on FB?

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.

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

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.

I think that there should be a push to build upon the idea of using XHTML markup to create a distributed social network.<p>Formally known as XFN?

<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/companies/enole" rel="nofollow">http://www.linkedin.com/companies/enole</a>

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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.

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

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.

Facebook is for cheap-ass squares. They will get the biggest bang for the non-existent buck with FB.<p>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.<p>Free isn't necessarily freedom which is why I tend to be doubly-cautious around it.

Ugh. Another FB article.<p>When the revolution comes, the spark that lights the fire won't come from Hacker News.<p>/me goes off to find a greasemonkey script to drop FB articles.