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

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

#61

Post by swernli »

rmundo wrote: post #39

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. 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, no…

There was a post on here a few days ago about just such a distributed system. Diaspora, and it's under development by some current college students looking for crowdsourced funding: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321651

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

#62

Post by piguy314 »

alanh wrote: post #26

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

> I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

If you disable public search and set search preferences to "friends only" that should solve this problem.

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

#63

Post by dangrover »

"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."

Is this really true, or is the author conflating updates with the newly-normalized interests fields?

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

#64

Post by alanh »

dirtyaura wrote: post #59
TheBurningOr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always technically 'possible,' to figure out how to make Facebook's privacy settings match yours, the fact that there are forum posts and blog posts like yours show that Facebook on some level is doing it wrong with privacy. Granted Facebook is a huge network, but if they are going to succeed, they need to match privacy with as much intuitiveness and perfectness as Google manages search results.

Not to defend Facebook per se, but "managing privacy intuitively" is hell of a user interaction problem. I don't know any design that could encompass all the complexity of human social interaction and privacy issues related to it intuitively.

This is indeed the last great problem of social UI — but Facebook could do with better defaults, which is half the battle.

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

#65

Post by hga »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #60
bartl wrote: post #56

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

On what legal basis? It's just a website that you can use if you like. I think Facebook is actually very useful because they are so openly nasty, disrespectful and deceptive. Their users are, on average, so incredibly negligent and clueless that the whole thing will blow up in society's face eventually, and then much better sites (maybe even a reformed Facebook) will emerge.

Indeed; I don't see their having done anything that rises to the level where an execution by the government is warranted. If they get slapped around some more by the FTC that will become even less likely.

One good thing that might come out of this is some "rules of the road" on changing ToS when they also change the social contract under which people entered their personal data.

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

#66

Post by kksm19820117 »

malloreon wrote: post #48

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

A la Piers Anthony: The function of the Chief Privacy Officer is to ensure that there is no privacy.

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

#67

Post by AgileCyborg »

Facebook is for cheap-ass squares. They will get the biggest bang for the non-existent buck with FB.

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.

Free isn't necessarily freedom which is why I tend to be doubly-cautious around it.

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

#68

Post by jacquesm »

mahmud wrote: post #23
Detrus wrote: post #15

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. 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 b…

FWIW, I have written a facebook clone in Common Lisp and took me 2 months. It has profile pages, a platform for 3rd party apps, elaborate RBAC-based security, and a rudimentary service API. If anybody wants to take this in some direction, I am more than happy to come aboard.

Need hosting?

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

#69

Post by jacquesm »

Todd wrote: post #38
cookiecaper wrote: post #16

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. 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'…

At first glance it seems nontrivial. As with most problems like this that can be decomposed into algorithms and datastructures, technology provides a solution. OpenID, OAuth, and Open Social were all developed to solve similar problems. My guess is that there will be half a dozen competing protocols within a year.

Better to have one good one.

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

#70

Post by jm4 »

rmundo wrote: post #39

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. 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, no…

You could probably build that pretty easily on Opera Unite.
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