Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by nkassis » Sat, May 08, 2010, 4:47 PM UTC

Detrus wrote: post #15

Yea let's get an open alternative, a few years of coding, a few years of Facebook screwing up, a massive hatefest, and it will have 30% penetration in 2018. By then there will be new technologies that will make the issue irrelevant. Same as Linux and Firefox. By the time the community effort got it together, most of the effort was obsolete. Google's Chrome OS throws much of linux away. NativeClient sandboxing turns b…

Yes because only 30% of computer uses something other than Windows right? Most computers aren't on peoples desks.

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

#92

Post by nkassis » Sat, May 08, 2010, 4:49 PM UTC

lukeqsee wrote: post #83

I am going to work on a new implementation of a facebook style website. Built on these core values: 1) User privacy 2) Data transferability 3) Open source software 4) Open API (for only that data that users allow, of course.) I plan to do it in a Python web framework, most likely Django. I know people have been discussing a distributed social network, but I don't see a market for that among the non-techies of the wor…

Glad that you're a hotmail user, oh wait that's not you ...

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

#93

Post by DrSprout » Sat, May 08, 2010, 5:07 PM UTC

wmeredith wrote: post #79

dirtyaura wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is in fact very hard to find these bugs. Most of the time when a person sees something about you, that person has no idea if that's in line with your preferences, so can't even know if Facebook is working as it's supposed to.

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

#94

Post by pasbesoin » Sat, May 08, 2010, 5:44 PM UTC

LiveTheDream wrote: post #89

sounddust wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

How is your friend list still public information, if you set it to private? You are suggesting that the privacy settings don't actually do anything, which is inaccurate. For example, if your friend list privacy is set to "Everyone", accessing your facebook page while logged out will show a random sample of your friends. Switch the privacy setting to "only friends" or something restrictive, return to the profile page…

The friends list is still available to third parties through the data API's. How long until a third party provides that data as a product? Actually, Facebook itself is already offering that data to employers, IIRC.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not talking about the publicly exposed "graph". I'm talking about what they've long provided to their third party affiliates, e.g. all the approved Facebook "application" developers/hosts.

P.S. Notice the nice information asymmetry involved in this, as well. You, as a private individual, have no access to this. But designated (and / as in paying) parties do, at the sole selection (I think I'll avoid use of the word "discretion") of Facebook.

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

#95

Post by pasbesoin » Sat, May 08, 2010, 5:59 PM UTC

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.

Something that contributes considerably to mitigation of the problem is to make changes "opt in". Users not opting in continue to get the old model. If you just can't support the old model any more, the default is removal of presentation and/or removal of the information involved.

A few people who can't be bothered to back up their own work and data, nor to respond to announcements of upcoming changes, may be pissed when items are "lost". But no one's privacy is compromised. Further, if you provide clear means of such a back up and/or instructions and advisement to maintain private copies, you can help lessen this second problem.

That's something to Google's credit, that they've officially supported and developed means for users to retrieve their data locally into documented, usable formats.

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

#96

Post by gaius » Sat, May 08, 2010, 6:50 PM UTC

sounddust wrote: post #76

thingie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ironical…

The thing is, this doesn't even make sense for FB to do. I've removed my interests and activities from my profile. Before the ads I got shown were basically relevant - they were mainly for products and services connected to those sports I listed, for example. Now the ads I get shown are fairly random. So Facebook have reduced my value to them as a set of eyeballs to show ads to. How can anyone at FB have thought this was a good idea?

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

#97

Post by wmf » Sat, May 08, 2010, 7:34 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #87

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…

I have a comment further down mentioning the horrendous mess that a P2P architecture would present. It would work for techies like us, but it wouldn't work for the segment that is making Facebook so transcendently popular. MySpace was a "teen" thing, others before it, too, but Facebook is mainstream; my grandma has a profile, my parents have profiles, and such is true of many. Also mainstream is turning off your comp…

This is why your "peer" should be a cloud server, not a PC. Call it S2S architecture.

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

#98

Post by ghb » Sat, May 08, 2010, 7:56 PM UTC

I'm curious as to why lifestreaming never caught on: why entrust all your data to a single service (Facebook) when you can entrust specific data to specific services (photos to flickr, status to twitter, bookmarks to delicious, etc). This fragmentation produces specific competition for hosting particular data (this is already the case: Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa etc) which should keep hosts fresh and honest as they don't want to lose users.

All lifestreaming did was aggregate all of this into a discoverable point with privacy controls.

What happened?

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

#99

Post by cookiecaper » Sat, May 08, 2010, 8:25 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #97

cookiecaper wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a comment further down mentioning the horrendous mess that a P2P architecture would present. It would work for techies like us, but it wouldn't work for the segment that is making Facebook so transcendently popular. MySpace was a "teen" thing, others before it, too, but Facebook is mainstream; my grandma has a profile, my parents have profiles, and such is true of many. Also mainstream is turning off your comp…

This is why your "peer" should be a cloud server, not a PC. Call it S2S architecture.

Right, but then you still have all of your data off somewhere in someone else's control. It'd possibly even be worse than Facebook, because an open "provider" that doesn't do anything except host data for Facebook & co. wouldn't be bringing any revenue, and thus would be tempted just to sell all the data you upload.

The point shouldn't be to cut out Facebook, it should be to keep the user in complete control of their data. You can transfer control to an arbitrary entity but what are they going to do to make money, and are they going to become corrupt or not? And if you asked yourself the same thing about Zuckerberg the day after Thefacebook went online, what would your answer be?

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

#100

Post by davidw » Sat, May 08, 2010, 9:03 PM UTC

Detrus wrote: post #47

davidw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit facile to compare something that works and has a few flaws, but is used by a great deal of people, with something that still isn't out of beta and isn't really used by anyone.

You mean desktop linux vs the web? Or even Linux vs iPhone OS?

No, I mean that apples are far superior to potatoes.