Re: FaceBook taking over the web, and semantic web

So to sum up, there is boring leg work to be done and plainer more vanilla
alternatives.
It is a strange idea in the first place that there should be a facebook
alternative when you realise that much of the appeal of facebook (as an
example of big service) is in its massiveness and control there of.
I would return to points I have previously made that our role lies more in
exemplary usage examples.
Let me put it this way, if there is something wrong with some aspect of
facebook build something that demonstrates a better alternative to that
particular aspect. Who knows, it may even be a facebook plugin.
(Something that even I might participate in, instead of just talk!)
Or else what you are saying is it is all or nothing: Everything about
facebook should be emulated in some alternative form.
That doesn't make sense to me, and misses the point.
The way I see it it is about control and alternatives that people have to
chose between.
If people feel controlled or manipulated through lack of choice they will
seek alternatives.
This isn't entirely inevitable, but it is pretty likely in the long run.

Best,

Adam

On 28 April 2010 10:33, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>>
>
>