Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 324 posts

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#241

Post by newscracker »

shreyshrey wrote: post #175
fredley wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and Insta I can (and do!) live without. Whatsapp though, is the main method of communication, and particularly group communication for all of my friends. It's almost impossible to leave.

Try AirSend ( https://www.airsend.io ). We use it for group communication both for personal and professional use. It is private. Create a channel and invite your friends. Thats it. Disclaimer: I work for them.

I had a very quick look. How is this different from Slack and how does it avoid the incessant notifications/interruptions/noise problem in Slack and similar platforms?

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#242

Post by vinceleo »

reaperducer wrote: post #27

The article talks mostly about e-mail and search, but you know what's still the best social network on the interwebs? E-mail. When I dumped social media two years ago, I gave my "friends" my e-mail address. Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events…

I'm very big fan of Elgg https://elgg.org

I believe that this social networking framework has a great future.

Look at these projects which created using this engine: Minds https://www.minds.com Pleio https://pleio.nl GCconnex and GCcollab https://github.com/gctools-outilsgc/gcconnex

There is even a Platform that will make building apps based on Elgg easier https://wzm.me/

Right now this project needs more cotributors to help it develop even more https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#243

Post by newscracker »

progx wrote: post #45

Why must i use facebook? A search engine, ok, but facebook?

So you can avoid using a search engine and just ask your “friends” on Facebook whatever you want an answer for and benefit from their collective wisdom? The answers may not be instantaneous, but you’d be connecting with humans instead of with machines.

/sarcasm

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#244

Post by lotsofpulp »

capableweb wrote: post #225
lotsofpulp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that in the US, anyone who communicates with people in other countries uses Whatsapp. It was the first easy way to communicate across borders and not have to worry about international charges. It’s also better than SMS/MMS.

> It was the first easy way to communicate across borders and not have to worry about international charges It was absolutely not. Skype was before, and many others. If you're talking about general communication applications/medium over internet.

I meant easy way for non computer literate people. You handed someone a phone, installed Whatsapp, it sent the auto verification text and now you could communicate without having to know your own username/password or without have to know someone else’s username. It was seamless, and that’s why it caught on so quick, and requiring the phone number verification made it so there was no spam.

The on boarding was so quick and painless, I feel like that’s what made it spread so quickly.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#245

Post by skyyler »

kerkeslager wrote: post #222

Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches, as do most sites I view as reasonable sources of information. Most discoverability comes from feeds (blogs, HN, Reddit)--searching limits you to terms you've already thought of. General search seems to lead either to the places already mentioned in g…

>Facebook: Does this even need a replacement?

Do you go to parties? Serious question. It's hard to discover events without Facebook these days. It's the only place some promoters advertise.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#246

Post by newscracker »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #44
prophesi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically speaking, Google is the one who innovates ground-breaking privacy-violating technology, and Facebook copies them a year or two later with much less tact.

Name the privacy violating technology. How and please be specific. I can give examples of FB violating user privacy. Cambridge Analytica.

There are too many to list. An online search is a better idea.

Here are two instances:

Google was (and probably still is) tracking your location on Android even when you turned off location services and storing it against your account.

Google signed you in automatically into Chrome whenever you signed in to a Google property. This change removed the ability to keep your Chrome browsing data strictly locally. After some Internet outrage, this was reversed.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#247

Post by oarabbus_ »

kerkeslager wrote: post #222

Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches, as do most sites I view as reasonable sources of information. Most discoverability comes from feeds (blogs, HN, Reddit)--searching limits you to terms you've already thought of. General search seems to lead either to the places already mentioned in g…

Facebook is the gold standard for events, still.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#248

Post by dcow »

kerkeslager wrote: post #222

Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches, as do most sites I view as reasonable sources of information. Most discoverability comes from feeds (blogs, HN, Reddit)--searching limits you to terms you've already thought of. General search seems to lead either to the places already mentioned in g…

The only remaining value I see in FB is the contacts. Someone should just make ContactBook...

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#249

Post by newscracker »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #145
fenwick67 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What breach of privacy is Google guilty of Some people would consider tracking users across the entire web and selling ads based on their behavior to be disrespectful of privacy. Google hasn't had any big fuck-ups like Facebook with CA, but ultimately they both are advertising companies that owe their success to selling personalized ads.

They are very different ad companies. One shows ads along side search results based on what you are looking for... FB snoops on me and shoves cereal ads at me like street corner flyer pushers.

Correction, Google shows ads based on what you search for, which locations you visit, who you communicate with, what kind of photos you take, who’s in the photos you take and so on. All the data collected by Google is intended and used to shove ads to you, since ads is the biggest money earner for Google by a huge margin. None of the Google services are provided “free” out of some benevolence.

If you’re using Android, Google has been snooping on you a lot more often than Facebook could dream of.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#250

Post by gonehome »

kerkeslager wrote: post #236
gonehome wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General search is still valuable for finding random programming examples that don't appear on Stack Overflow - there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example. For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text). It'd be nice if this extended to optional accounts that had…

> there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example. Each with their own search, usually! I can see the downsides to this, but in trade you're getting a bubble that protects you from a lot of nonsense. > For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text). That sounds like…

I'd push that the real value of Twitter is less the additional data sources and more the available discussion that's possible with smart people doing interesting things that you would not have as much access to.

Only mentioning this because I personally didn't understand the value of Twitter for a long time and didn't understand why people used it, but now I think I do.

Post reply on HN