Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
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Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
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Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#2For reference, here is a screenshot of my Appleseed newsfeed:
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#3For reference, here is a screenshot of my Appleseed newsfeed: http://goo.gl/RjD3f
Although I am cheering for every Facebook alternative, the UI in your screenshot needs work.
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#4For reference, here is a screenshot of my Appleseed newsfeed: http://goo.gl/RjD3f
Although I am cheering for every Facebook alternative, the UI in your screenshot needs work.
What do you suggest? Often people take issue with the color scheme, which is understandable, a default theme for an open source project needs to find a reasonable balance between good enough to use and ugly enough that people want to change it. It's important that people have the desire to "brand" their node, so as to avoid confusion.
Appleseed is fully themable using CSS, and keeps a clear separation between logic and presentation, so any designer can make it look any way they'd like.
However, if you're speaking more to the actual user interface, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on what you find to be an issue.
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#5The approach of OneSocialWeb seems to be to define and extend existing standard protocols. This general direction seems appealing to me but in anycase, it's one extreme of possible approaches.
With Elgg or Insoshi, a "social networking engine" isn't particularly different from a generic CMS. In this sense, Drupal might be the leading alternative to Facebook, since it's dominant in its field (you could argue for wordpress too). And maybe that's an idea. An alternative to Facebook is to add a protocol to several common CMSes that would let you aggregate you friend's posts - Tie-together all the world's BBSes into a bullwork against Facebook. Anyway, a pure CMS where you sort the protocol later is the other extreme of approaches.
Appleseed and Diaspora seem somewhat in the middle of these approaches. They sort-of have protocols but don't seem to be protocol driven.
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#6For reference, here is a screenshot of my Appleseed newsfeed: http://goo.gl/RjD3f
Although I am cheering for every Facebook alternative, the UI in your screenshot needs work.
Can you please tell us about any Facebook's alternative UI that does not "need work"? That something "needs work" is one of the most obvious comments that somebody could think of. Everything needs work.
It would be more constructive if you could provide us with some points that the appearance of that network could be somehow better.
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#7The approach of OneSocialWeb seems to be to define and extend existing standard protocols. This general direction seems appealing to me but in anycase, it's one extreme of possible approaches. With Elgg or Insoshi, a "social networking engine" isn't particularly different from a generic CMS. In this sense, Drupal might be the leading alternative to Facebook, since it's dominant in its field (you could argue for wordp…
Appleseed is built to be protocol agnostic. It abstracts out the protocol to a series of event triggers/hooks. It can even juggle multiple protocols at the same time.
This was a deliberate decision, because we're still waiting to see which protocol will win out, so once that happens, by design, it's much more trivial to move Appleseed over to that protocol in a seamless way than other similar projects.
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although I am cheering for every Facebook alternative, the UI in your screenshot needs work.
What do you suggest? Often people take issue with the color scheme, which is understandable, a default theme for an open source project needs to find a reasonable balance between good enough to use and ugly enough that people want to change it. It's important that people have the desire to "brand" their node, so as to avoid confusion. Appleseed is fully themable using CSS, and keeps a clear separation between logic a…
The screen-shot looks OK to me but I'm not a professional designer - the only thing that occurs to me is that div-sizes might be slightly awkward or the type might be a bit small.
One problem with any Facebook alternative where you have just one "reference application" implemented is that people will glance at the page and judge it by looks regardless of how configurable it is. That's a problem with any UI sadly enough.
I guess that's why I like the idea of creating layers and protocols to allow easy, multiple implementations. IE, my idea of five minutes ago - plugins for Drupal, Wordpress and Phpbb to ties multiple sites into a single large social network. The issue of design might then not be front-and-center.
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#9The approach of OneSocialWeb seems to be to define and extend existing standard protocols. This general direction seems appealing to me but in anycase, it's one extreme of possible approaches. With Elgg or Insoshi, a "social networking engine" isn't particularly different from a generic CMS. In this sense, Drupal might be the leading alternative to Facebook, since it's dominant in its field (you could argue for wordp…
Appleseed is built to be protocol agnostic. It abstracts out the protocol to a series of event triggers/hooks. It can even juggle multiple protocols at the same time. This was a deliberate decision, because we're still waiting to see which protocol will win out, so once that happens, by design, it's much more trivial to move Appleseed over to that protocol in a seamless way than other similar projects.
Which protocols are you testing? Which do you like?
Re: Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Appleseed is built to be protocol agnostic. It abstracts out the protocol to a series of event triggers/hooks. It can even juggle multiple protocols at the same time. This was a deliberate decision, because we're still waiting to see which protocol will win out, so once that happens, by design, it's much more trivial to move Appleseed over to that protocol in a seamless way than other similar projects.
Which protocols are you testing? Which do you like?
Internally, it uses a custom protocol, which allows me to tweak it easily for my needs. The one I'm keeping my eye on is OStatus, and that's definitely the biggest possibility for what I'd switch to.
Although I like XMPP in theory, the requirement of running an XMPP server conflicts with Appleseed's requirement of being able to run on a vanilla shared host with no root access.