Re: FaceBook taking over the web, and semantic web

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>> <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.
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> Drupal is going RDFa, with some good developers behind it.  Satus,net has
> FOAF support.
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Besides RDFa, all users have an automatic WebID, and they can also host
their FOAF+SSL certificate on their user profile page [1].

Steph.

[1] http://github.com/scor/rdf/tree/master/rsapublickey/


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>> Facebook have also opensourced some great code, eg.
>> http://cassandra.apache.org/
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>> This current situation is not for shortage of lines of code, or ability to
>> re-use it.
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>>> 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?
>>>
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>> 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.
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>>>
>>> Dozens of business models out there to make money. If we just consider
>>> the following
>>> - Usability on Blackberry, Eclipse and Android platforms
>>>
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>> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
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>>>  - Open Feeds to other Social Networks
>>>
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>> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
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>>> - Linked Data standards for meta data encoding
>>>
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>> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
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>>>  - Interfacing capability with Google functionality
>>>
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>> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
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>>> - External Formats Compatibility e.g. for professional networks like
>>> LinkedIn
>>>
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>> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
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>>>  - Feature Import for Email Providers like Yahoo!, Gmail
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>> Who pays, how much, how often and how reliably?
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>> 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...
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>>> Most of features on FaceBook are a nuisance to professional users.
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>> "most?" :)  what list are your working from here...
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>>>  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!
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>> 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
>>
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