61–70 of 97 posts
If facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment then it could very well be they have a real problem on their hands. Apparently it is ok to take your users for a ride, but only so far. I'm pretty happy about all this, maybe there will be a serious push back against all these companies that see the information they hold about their users as their 'product'. What's next, distributed search engines?
If facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment then it could very well be they have a real problem on their hands. Apparently it is ok to take your users for a ride, but only so far. I'm pretty happy about all this, maybe there will be a serious push back against all these companies that see the information they hold about their users as their 'product'. What's next, distributed search engines?
Facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment in less than 0.1% of their users.
Meh. I don't think software people understand just how disinclined a non-software person is to do anything requiring configuring serverside stuff. Even torrents, where clients have essentially become good enough that all you have to do is install them, most people get a friend that has some understanding of computers to set them up for them. The cloud is really a better model if you want to achieve widespread adoptio…
I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the only way for the average person to use the service is to pay for it, that's going to be a very tough hill to climb.
Unless someone else hosts an ad-supported version that turns out to be viable. But I agree that their business model needs work.
A team of four NYU CS students...what's the 10k for? Just build it!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Getting people to pay for an otherwise free service might be tricky, but I'm sure google would foot the bill (and do the hosting) if they got to push more ad-words.
It will probably go: self-hosted and hosted (by techies), then big companies find a way to do the hosting for non-techies in order to push ads.
Movable identities - DNS works. A DHT with email-addresses as the primary key (rather than domain names) would also work (though you would need some karma ratings system to keep it from being hacked). You would either use DNS, or reinvent a DNS-like protocol. No big deal.
Meh. I don't think software people understand just how disinclined a non-software person is to do anything requiring configuring serverside stuff. Even torrents, where clients have essentially become good enough that all you have to do is install them, most people get a friend that has some understanding of computers to set them up for them. The cloud is really a better model if you want to achieve widespread adoptio…
That's why they build it such that people can simply pay a 3rd party that offers the service and just use them to hold their identity. Not as much control as hosting it yourself, but still not as bad as facebook where you can't leave and they hold EVERYONE's data.
The largest cell phone market is the one for generic simple phones that just make calls, regardless of the smartphone hype. The reason that IE is so ubiquitous is that a huge number of people don't really care, as long as they can get on the internet, and go on facebook and youtube and maybe a few other sites, thats enough for them.
Hell, even look at dropbox, people only started using that sort of service when it went into the cloud and became dead easy. They didn't care that they were locking all their data into a hard to leave service.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great if there was a way to recreate facebook in an open software setting, I just don't think any social network where the average user would have to either install a complicated app or pay a fee will ever get off the ground...