Re: FaceBook taking over the web, and semantic web

2010/4/28 Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>

>
>
> On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 3:11 AM, ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <
> metadataportals@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Dan and Matthew
>>
>> There must be an alternative to FaceBook, without all the restrictions and
>> proprietary formats and ties to third parties.
>>
>> If it does not exist it must be built. Millions of open source coders out
>> there.
>
>
>
There is an alternative.  It does exist.  It's called HTTP.  I use it.  What
limitations do you see?


> LiveJournal (one of the few current social networks older than FOAF) is
> based on opensource code, see http://www.livejournal.com/code/ and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_sites_using_the_LiveJournal_codebase for
> a list of installations.
>
> <http://www.livejournal.com/code/>See also
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_(software)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_%28software%29>
>

Elgg FOAF is being actively developed (my latest patch was included in the
last version), there's also modules for Ostatus technology in deveopment
(activity streams, pubsubhubub, server to server)

I think elgg is going to win the the race to be the first to have support
for FOAF+SSL and SPARQL Update leading to a federated read/write web ...
time will tell on that one


>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_%28software%29>Drupal and Wordpress
> also have a lot of what you're looking for. If you like Twitter, you'll love
> StatusNet.
>

Drupal is going RDFa, with some good developers behind it.  Satus,net has
FOAF support.


>
> Facebook have also opensourced some great code, eg.
> http://cassandra.apache.org/
>
> This current situation is not for shortage of lines of code, or ability to
> re-use it.
>
>
>> Several organizations have asked us in the past if an open access open
>> source alternative to the FaceBook functionality could be created.
>>
>> How about creating a global open source code coop to develop such an
>> alternative?
>>
>
> The GNU project are just launching something in this direction - see
> http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social ... it sounds just what you're
> looking for.  I suggest joining the list
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social-discuss  --- I won't
> repeat my views here, but see
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/social-discuss/2010-03/msg00034.html where
> I argue that federation and standards are more important than creating set
> another software toolkit.
>
>
>>
>> Dozens of business models out there to make money. If we just consider the
>> following
>> - Usability on Blackberry, Eclipse and Android platforms
>>
>
> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
>
>
>> - Open Feeds to other Social Networks
>>
>
> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
>
>
>> - Linked Data standards for meta data encoding
>>
>
> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
>
>
>> - Interfacing capability with Google functionality
>>
>
> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
>
>
>> - External Formats Compatibility e.g. for professional networks like
>> LinkedIn
>>
>
> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
>
>
>> - Feature Import for Email Providers like Yahoo!, Gmail
>
>
> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
>
>
> It's the business / sustainability / bill-paying story that's interesting.
> Someone has to cover all those bandwidth bills if you're really going after
> 1% of humanity. Not to mention salaries, if your quality of service and
> support is going to cope with the burden of  100s of 1000s of non-technical
> users blundering around messing things up. Which means that charging $ for a
> 'pro' account or putting in advertising will soon be discussed. And then the
> folks with MBAs show up and what starts as idealism blends into the
> pre-existing landscape...
>
>
>> Most of features on FaceBook are a nuisance to professional users.
>
>
> "most?" :)  what list are your working from here...
>
>
>> How many academically and technically trained professionals are there out
>> there, on a global scale?
>>
>> If we assume 1% of the global population, that would still be 65 million
>> potential users!
>
>
> I'm not sure the answer to "we don't like this megasite" is "so we'll build
> a better megasite, all free and open". I don't think the answer is "we'll
> build the one true distributed social-stuff toolkit" either (ie. my fear w/
> current GNU Social). The answer - if there is one - is perhaps more boring.
> To do the dull but worth job of integrating, modernising and cross-linking
> the existing social infrastructure of the Web. How do we persuade people to
> put unthanked time into beautifying eg. MailMan or migrating the big IRC
> networks to XMPP, when instead they could be trying to "beat Facebook" and
> build another Web site bigger than many countries...
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>