What ever happened to FOAF? The way to do this is to build it on the web, not to try to create some new peer-to-peer system.
Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the ability to easily self-host an identity server or to be able to just pay someone else to be hosted on theirs is hugely important. Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. Doing that last part securely is one of the things that hung me up when thinking about it, but I also only really dug into it for an hour or so.
Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. I think DNS is the key here; it lets you move a server while keeping the same name.
This can be handled by 301 redirect or it can be built into the protocol. When moving a profile from one provider to another, the standard could require a response indicating the location of the profile for a minimum period of time (such as a week or a month).
A standard such as this would be crawled on a frequent basis by the social network apps built on top of it, as well as the search engines. They would all update their canonical profile addresses and that would be that--an organic, self repairing network.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#23If loads are distributed across a network, how secure would your information be? I guess you could get around that by being explicit about how open your data is and discourage people to post sensitive info. Also, by re-federating the service of Facebook with partner companies (push pics back to flickr, status back to twitter, etc.), they could get some nice allies, reduce the bandwidth requirements dramatically, and…
The biggest sticking point is going to be the web of trust. Facebook's walled garden is excellent at managing identity, and this would be very difficult if any random 419 scammer can set up a Diaspora server and plug into the network. Really, it seems like turn-key services are the primary solution, though the important thing is to get a competitive marketplace where some are ad-supported, some aren't, but all of the…
With your comment, we've left my technical understanding in the dust.
That said, would it be possible to get research universities to act as the network? I assume people would be trusting of that.
Or is there a way to encrypt data or split it up in ways that makes it meaningless to any individual without the right password/signature?
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest sticking point is going to be the web of trust. Facebook's walled garden is excellent at managing identity, and this would be very difficult if any random 419 scammer can set up a Diaspora server and plug into the network. Really, it seems like turn-key services are the primary solution, though the important thing is to get a competitive marketplace where some are ad-supported, some aren't, but all of the…
With your comment, we've left my technical understanding in the dust. That said, would it be possible to get research universities to act as the network? I assume people would be trusting of that. Or is there a way to encrypt data or split it up in ways that makes it meaningless to any individual without the right password/signature?
Trust would be an issue. In an open system, it would always be possible to set up a rogue server with spoofed profiles.
There are ways to combat this. Using OAuth for authentication keeps them from getting your credentials. It or a similar protocol for data exchange allows you to shut them off if they're proven bogus. They might have limited visibility into your network in the meantime, but that's it.
It will probably end up working a lot like the web works now. You'll have to look at the URL and decide if you trust the provider. You can also send a message along with the friend invite and prior to accepting another's invite, that gives you some confidence that you know that person. Finally, by seeing that you share common friends on common providers will be a strong indicator.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#25I don't full grasp the concept but it seems to me that making users set up their computer to act like some kind of peer is a great barrier to entry for everyday folks.
They won't have to do this. Most will probably go with a provider such as Google, MSN, or Yahoo!. The "cool kids" will install a Wordpress plugin or set up their own.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#26What ever happened to FOAF? The way to do this is to build it on the web, not to try to create some new peer-to-peer system.
FOAF has some great ideas. Unfortunately, for a system to have the level of functionality that users have come to expect, it will have to be a protocol run as web services. I think many of those ideas or even parts of the standard can be leveraged, though.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#27If loads are distributed across a network, how secure would your information be? I guess you could get around that by being explicit about how open your data is and discourage people to post sensitive info. Also, by re-federating the service of Facebook with partner companies (push pics back to flickr, status back to twitter, etc.), they could get some nice allies, reduce the bandwidth requirements dramatically, and…
The security will be determined by your web of connections and the quality of their profile providers. For such a system to be functional and have sufficient appeal to 3rd parties such as Google and other systems that will want to crawl the graph, a certain portion will have to be open. Things like your name and connections to others.
Ultimately, a larger subset of your data will eventually become public. This will happen by users installing games and other apps on top of the system that aren't as trustworthy. This can happen today with Facebook. It just isn't talked about much. Writing an app for FB is eye opening.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#28I wonder how many people have considered building something along these lines. I know I did when I started hearing about what came out of f8, and I don't even use Facebook currently.
I played with this idea a full year ago. The ability to own your own data and share it out as a web service or data host. There would be no need for a centralized server, and it would provide many competitive opportunities to host what I came to call "identity servers." This would create innovation as each value added provider can experiment with the direction. I won't be the first to call it now - but I can imagine…
> Remember, the internet itself is decentralized.
I think it's a common misconception. You can be decentralised with friends. With the whole world, you need a single entity. Just look at Facebook, Twitter, Google, MSN -vs- Jabber (even gtalk is not a jabber in the mind of users - it's gtalk / google chat), money transfer services, iAnything from Apple, etc.
People seem to like centralisation - they know where to go and how to call it.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#29All they need is a simple migration path for users and they (or something like them) will be able to knock Facebook out of the water—but it'll happen quietly at first, like any other disruptive technology.
Considering you are now allowed to permanently store data extracted from FB with their API, I wonder just how easy/doable this would be now...
This policy was just changed. Now apps can store data as long as they like because they are in a contract with the user.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#30I find this 'social' tunnel-vision saddening. The ideal model of communication is more akin to a pastebin, where you can quickly host any data abstraction, not just people profiles.