Open Facebook Alternatives Gain Momentum, $115K

[h3rm35]

Open Facebook Alternatives Gain Momentum, $115K


A screenshot of a beta of the open source, federated social networking program OneSocialWeb running on a server at betavine.net.

A screenshot of a beta of the open-source, federated social networking program OneSocialWeb running on a server at betavine.net.

When Wired.com called for an open alternative to Facebook last Friday, lamenting the company’s untrammeled desire to control your online identity and reconfigure the world’s privacy norms, reader response was overwhelming, with hundreds of comments and ironically, thousands of “Like” votes on Facebook.

Now, a group of four New York University students — who were working on just what we called for — have harnessed that dissatisfaction in the form of more than $115,000 in crowdsourced funding for their distributed, social networking system called Diaspora. That’s the equivalent of a significant angel round of funding in the internet startup world, and their fundraising on the Kickstarter crowdsourced funding site has another 19 days to go.

It’s also an impressive for a project proposal from four students who say they aren’t going to start coding until they graduate from college this summer. And a testament to how strongly that a growing number of people want an alternative to a centralized and dominant social networking site.

The students took their inspiration from a speech in February by the outspoken Software Freedom Law Center founder and Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen. In that speech to New York’s Internet Society, Moglen accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of having “done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age” and described Facebook as a “terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.”

Diaspora isn’t the only effort to break open the “terrarium.”

For instance, there’s OneSocialWeb, a distributed social networking service that’s under development by four Vodafone employees.

It’s got working code and currently lets users share messages and make connections. The basic protocol is open, using the instant messaging protocol XMPP — the same as Google’s innovative but lightly used Wave collaboration and messaging system.

Power users can install their own server, while others can use a version hosted on someone else’s. That’s much like the open-source WordPress publishing system, which anyone can install on an owned or rented server — or choose to use WordPress.org’s online service.

Currently, users can create profiles, “follow” and “friend” other users, “like” their updates, and share videos and photos.

Laurent Eschenauer, one of the OneSocialWeb developers, says his project and Diaspora share the goal of providing a “free, open and decentralized alternative to the social networking silos that are Facebook and Twitter.” He says he hopes that Diaspora looks to work cooperatively with his project, rather than “reinventing the wheel.”

OneSocialWeb already allows accounts hosted on different servers to send messages and photos in real time, and the group plans to have a version 1.0 available this summer (early beta versions can be downloaded to your own server now). A hosted version that less-technically inclined users can use should be available by end of summer.

The recent news also reinvigorated developer Michael Chisari, who decided to reopen his open source social networking project called Appleseed, which already has working code that allows users on different sites to “friend” each other and interoperate.

Chisari describes the project as “seeing the user as an online citizen, as opposed to a consumer to be targeted”, which he says is in “stark contrast to current social networking websites, who rely heavily on ad placement and data mining of their users.”

Both OneSocialWeb and Appleseed share the same problem: getting enough users to make users want to sign up — the so-called network effect where a network gets exponentially more useful as it gets bigger. (Think of the fax machine as an example — two fax machines in the world aren’t very useful, but your fax machine becomes much more useful when there are 1,000 of them, and even more valuable when there are 10 million.)

Diaspora is taking a different tack, according to Moglen, who has taken the students on as clients and is informally advising them.

Users don’t have to choose to stop using Facebook or Twitter and will be able use the Diaspora client to use those all those services in one place — much like Friendfeed currently does. But when Diaspora knows that the person you are trying to communicate with also has Diaspora, it will use peer-to-peer, encrypted methods to send that message. And as more and more people start using the free software, they’ll slowly find themselves weaned from for-profit services, according to Moglen.

“This is the crucial way out of the walled garden,” Moglen said. “It gives a smooth transition to federated network services.”

Moglen says he’s not picking a favorite in the race to unseat Facebook with open source and free software.

But he says the money raised by Diaspora is also a significant moment for the free software movement.

“The funding is not through the capital market and not through the venture capital system, but through civil society,” said Moglen. “This is a signal to Facebook, and I am sure Facebook is getting it.”

[groen2]

lol i bet the cia is pissed, sorry i bet facebook is pissed.

[h3rm35]

ever had a virus on ubuntu? yeah... I think they might be. TTYL.

[FastTadpole]

Quote:Five Things That Could Topple Facebook’s Empire
By Ryan Singel Email Author
July 20, 2010

Facebook is primed to announce this week that it’s amassed a half billion active friends, a milestone reinforcing its status as the king of social networks – a company to be regarded with the seriousness and power (if not revenue) of Google, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Five hundred million and rising also makes it clear to anyone not paying attention that Facebook is no fad, that it is a cultural force shaping our collective culture. Even if you have no desire to ever set up a profile, you can’t ignore it and you are now oddly defined in the negative and left out of the zeitgeist.

A service of that size won’t disappear anytime soon, even if Facebook has hit its plateau in the U.S. But net users are fickle and the web’s short history includes dozens of sites that were once high-flying that have either since died (Geocities), lost their luster (Yahoo) or faded into irrelevance (Friendster).

So how could Facebook lose its place at the center of the web?

1. Open, Distributed Alternatives

A pack of college kids drunk on Free Software launched an open-source, federated alternative to Facebook called Diaspora. After collecting an astonishing $120K in donations, the group is knocking out code. Meanwhile, there’s other cool stuff going on, including OneSocialWeb, the Appleseed Project and WebFinger. Get enough of these open protcols into decent shape and someone is likely to build them into an improbably powerful stack. Research the LAMP stack, if you don’t get my drift.

What might that look like? An elimination of the need for a centralized home and coordinator of social networking — where your social profile lives wherever you want it to (as your e-mail does) and can interact with any other profile around the net, on your own terms.

While it sounds far fetched, a recent poll suggests that people are as happy with Facebook as they are with their cable company, even if they do find it similarly indispensable.

2. Google Me

There’s rumors the search giant is hatching its own social network system, despite the fact that it’s just not particularly good at social networking. It’s Orkut social network has flailed and even seems to be losing its final two treasures, India and Brazil, to Facebook.

Google’s take on Twitter — called Buzz — isn’t bad, but it’s not been much of a hit — despite some fine features — thank god for threaded coversations. And then it’s got Wave and Google Talk, and Google Chat and Google Profile and Google pages and Google Docs. I wonder if anyone has tried stacking any of those together over there in the Googleplex to create a place that people actually want to hang out at — the clear difference between a site like Facebook and a site like Google search.

Interesting things happen when people hang out.

3. Location-based services and the mobile device

With the stunning popularity of pocket computers — starting with the iPhone, location-centric services such as FourSquare are gaining users at the rate that Facebook use to. Perhaps most importantly, they figuring out ways to use the addictive mechanics of gaming to create services even more engrossing than Facebook.

To compete, Facebook has its own, very well liked mobile app, and is set to expand how it interacts with the real world. But there’s a real threat here that Facebook could get outflanked by clever kids not too much unlike themselves, who figure out how to create a more potent digital heroin.
4. The U.S. Postal Service

For those who love dark horses or the old and familiar, there’s always a chance that the world suddenly tires of their Wall and virtual farming, and decide to get off the net’s grid entirely. Socializing will still be necessary, of course, so we’ll see the return of sockhops, neighborhood restaurants and church socials.

As for written messages, the Postal Service is actually quite good at delivering hand-written correspondence anywhere in the States for a nominal fee. The photo postcard will be huge again. But since the Postal Service is proposing to cease Saturday delivery, its social networking service would be a weekday only affair. Vive la Poste!

5. Overreaching on the part of Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has changed the culture of the world with his single-minded devotedness to making people share more information with more people.

In a world where software can determine culture, Zuckerberg’s unwavering drive to make more and more of the details of our lives public by default has triumphed in nearly every instance over prevailing cultural norms — with the glaring exception of the Beacon project.

But as with all visionaries, there is always the danger that in his attempt to lead his flock to the land of milk and honey, there will come a moment where he steps too far ahead, and the flock abandons the frontier for the pasture, leaving him alone and howling in the wilderness.

See Also:

* Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative
* Today Facebook, Tomorrow the World
* By the Numbers: Has Facebook Fatigue Set In?
* Open Facebook Alternatives Gain Momentum, $115K
* Google Takes On Facebook, Twitter With ‘Buzz’
* Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Web

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/f...pire/all/1


Related Articles / Forum Threads:

The billionaire Facebook founder making a fortune from your secrets (though you probably don't know he's doing it)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ng-it.html

Video: Does what happen on Facebook stay on Facebook?


The video says something on affiliation of Peter Theil of PayPal having founded The Vanguard Project which has close affiliations with PayPal and Apple and moveon.org. Anyone know much about The Vanguard Project they seem to be a libertarian / conservative movement - big brother honeypot?

The Fallacy of Accurate Information
http://www.jonathanmacdonald.com/?p=4612

Facebook founder called trusting users dumb f*cks
http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=32905

Facebook moves closer to a virtual currency system that pays workers <$1/day
http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=33890

Microsoft and Facebook Team Up
http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=32600

Facebook steps up lobbying, deepens ties with intelligence agencies, FTC
http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=32637

Police force's Facebook app raises privacy concerns
http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=5364

The Evil behind Facebook
http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=9653