Re: FaceBook taking over the web, and semantic web

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.

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?

Dozens of business models out there to make money. If we just consider the following
- Usability on Blackberry, Eclipse and Android platforms
- Open Feeds to other Social Networks
- Linked Data standards for meta data encoding
- Interfacing capability with Google functionality
- External Formats Compatibility e.g. for professional networks like LinkedIn
- Feature Import for Email Providers like Yahoo!, Gmail

Most of features on FaceBook are a nuisance to professional users.

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!

Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
www.rainbowwarriors.net
Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide
www.projectparadigm.info



--- On Mon, 4/26/10, Matthew Rowe <m.rowe@dcs.shef.ac.uk> wrote:

From: Matthew Rowe <m.rowe@dcs.shef.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: FaceBook taking over the web, and semantic web
To: "Dan Brickley" <danbri@danbri.org>
Cc: "ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program" <metadataportals@yahoo.com>, "semantic-web" <semantic-web@w3.org>
Date: Monday, April 26, 2010, 1:48 PM


On 23 Apr 2010, at 10:45, Dan Brickley wrote:
(cc: list trimmed; one list is usually enough, two is plenty... three means people start complaining)

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 4:12 PM, ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <metadataportals@yahoo.com> wrote:
 Facebook plans to take over the web, by creating open graph based semantic content.
 
See:
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2010/04/22/facebook-f8-internet-open-social-graph-semantic-web-twitter.aspx
 
FaceBook has come under fire for selling information about users to marketing companies.

Is this a serious threat to the open structure of the Internet and the linked data paradigm as envisioned by the W3C? 
There are plenty of things that people worry about re Facebook. I think putting structured metadata in public Web pages needn't be one of those things. We might wish the RDFa markup was tidier in syntax or semantics, etc., but I don't think putting the director's name/ID into a movie-describing page, or cuisine into a restaurant-describing page is a cause for concern. 
My main worry about Facebook is one shared with many of the other huge profile-hosting and content-hosting sites: people are living their online lives inside someone else's dns domain name. If Facebook provides were http://johnsmith.example.name/ instead of http://facebook.com/johnsmith/ ie. spread around and portable, I'd be much happier. So this new attempt to reach out into the non-facebook.com Web is interesting. It strikes me as much healthier if the main Web presence for a restaurant is at a Web site owned/controlled by the restaurant, rather than on an internet domain owned by Facebook (or Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, whoever...). If their new-found ability to make normal Web pages function like Facebook Fan pages, then I think the trend over all is healthy. After all you can always chop out the Facebook-specific markup in a few years, if you decide you don't like them. Whereas if you go around putting http://facebook.com/yourname or
 http://twitter.com/yourname as your main URL, and encouraging everyone to link to it, then you are making it hard to ever leave those sites. 
This pretty much sums up my worries of Facebook. They are now the biggest identity provider, allowing web users to login to sites using Facebook Connect and now, with the addition of the Open Graph Protocol, allow content external to Facebook to be associated with a given user's Facebook account. This idea of "Identity Real Estate" is what Facebook are aiming for, so that you can get the most out of the Web and 3rd party sites by using your Facebook identity, rather than from another provider. I am not sure there is any real solution to this... 
Matthew Rowe, MEngPhD StudentOAK GroupDepartment of Computer ScienceUniversity of Sheffieldm.rowe@dcs.shef.ac.uk