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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

#71

Post by sounddust »

p858snake wrote: post #46
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.

A. Go to profile -> down to friends list -> click on the pencil -> Remove the tick in the box (Will still show mutual friends though) B. Change your privacy settings, Make it so you can only be found by searching certain things (eg: email address), Block your boss C. Unfortunately not (yet?)

A. Facebook has made it clear during the big "everyone" push that hiding your friends on your profile page is not the same thing as hiding it from public access; it is still considered public information by Facebook and can be accessed as such.

B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. It's only a matter of time before people start scraping this information and publishing it in a way that it's clearly accessible from Google, and Facebook won't be able to do anything about it.

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

#72

Post by rmundo »

swernli wrote: post #61
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

Thanks for the heads up, I missed that one.

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

#73

Post by stickhandle »

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.

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

#74

Post by Keyframe »

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.

- Photos here and there

- Random links/videos scooped around the net

- Rants/statuses nobody cares about

- Passive activism where people "join a group"/like something and do nothing about it

- Farmville

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.

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

#75

Post by raganwald »

dangrover wrote: post #63

"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…

Here's the page for the "Legos" interest:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Legos/110234219005966?ref=t...

Take a look at the "Related Global Posts" list below. You'll see lots of stuff from people who don't list lego in their interests fields.

The question I have is whether posts still show up if your status updates are hidden to people who are not friends or friends of friends.

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

#76

Post by sounddust »

thingie wrote: post #54
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 wonder how could any Facebook replacement (or Facebook itself) allow somebody to support some group while not telling anyone. Of course it's possible, donate some money, do some job for them, but… on Facebook or something like Facebook? How?

Facebook itself used to have this level of privacy protection. You could join a group and post on the wall and in the forums for that group privately. If your privacy settings were to disallow non-friends from seeing your profile, then it would just show your first name and a generic placeholder as your photo. Your name would be unclickable and therefore untraceable to you unless you had a unique first name.

Ironically, right before the big push to erode users' privacy, it seemed that they might have taken it a step further and replaced your name with "facebook user", removing even your first name (I was never sure if this was intentional or a bug, but in any case it didn't last long as the big privacy changes came soon after).

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

#77

Post by Nagyman »

c00p3r wrote: post #29

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. 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. What is really interesting - is an emerging market of the Android-powered devices. The hardware is powerful and cheap enough,…

A thousand times yes. I just made the same comment not 2 days ago on reddit. The next social networks are an extension of our mobile network which already exist. My only concern is that I don't trust carriers any more than facebook. And I don't want to pay per message. So an open system is paramount ... And doing it before a Closed business gains the most marketshare in that space.

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

#79

Post by wmeredith »

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.

It's pretty easy, actually, just make everything opt-in instead of opt-out.
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