Jeff Jarvis: I want the opposite of what Facebook just did

http://thefastertimes.com/mediaandtech/2010/04/22/my-facebook-problem-and-yours/

by dreambird • 16 years ago

81 46 16 years ago

stcredzero8• 16 years ago

Some good insights here.

Rishad Tobaccowala tweeted: “you are right. What we want closed (our data) they want open. What we want open (create and transfer) they want closed.”

There's room for someone to give us what we want. What if there was a P2P open source app about communication / status / notification?

A web browser would be a good platform for this to reside in. There would have to be a daemon/service component as well. Perhaps a cloud component, but with distributed control and controlled encrypted access, so only immediately linked nodes could ever be compromised.

nfnaaron3• 16 years ago

[something like] tor + [something like] rss + some kind of permission/auth mechanism

your browser client gets permission to subscribe to a "friend" and keeps up to date via [something like] rss over [something like] tor.

nfnaaron3• 16 years ago

or:

modified google/blogger, default private +

existing rss that blogger already has +

some kind of permission/auth mechanism

Not as free/open as you might like, but quicker/easier to implement.

_delirium• 16 years ago

This is why, despite being too young to actually have experienced them, I miss the days when people who actually had the good of the network in mind hashed out ideas over RFCs before rolling something out. I imagine they would come up with something with some parameters vaguely in that space (though maybe not including tor).

stcredzero8• 16 years ago

I was thinking something more like encrypted storage in the cloud for pull and offline access to feeds. Realtime updates would happen over a push mechanism. (Otherwise polling would make things expensive.) Everything would be encrypted and in complete control by the "local" segment of the graph.

roc2• 16 years ago

Or, just use Wave.

Even though Google is fumbling this service, it really could launch decentralized social networking services.

They just need a 'phase 1' client that draws better imaginary walls between the 'parts' of the service, to fit most users' current conception of how the internet works.

People aren't 'getting' the idea that an email, a chat and a picture archive are the same thing under the hood. Google, meanwhile, is so proud of the technical possibilities that they won't shut up about that part. And it's confusing the crap out of the users they should be enticing.

Google needs to build that more-traditional-looking client and pitch it as a decentralized Facebook competitor.

bbuffone• 16 years ago

I completely agree with the P2P approach, for sometime I was thinking about P2P as a means to deliver a social network for families. Everyones graph and data would be under their control and "local" to just those that needed it.

The one key element that makes the web possible, isn't HTML, HTTP, CSS, blah, blah, blah... it is the fact that it is decentralized. If for some reason we are tricked into moving away from this we are not longer using the web. We are just using AOL 2.0 - Google, Facebook, twitter, bit.ly.... are all trying take control of not users, but their information and the web.

Don’t think it will happen... it already has. The URL is the essence of how the web works and you no longer control yours. Link shortening, makes it easier to paste and share links but it breaks the web. Currently, I am sitting in China writing this comment and every link that bit.ly has under its control are completely useless to every person in China. My slogan that I came up with for Bit.ly is "Billions of links useless to billions of people!" Please don’t respond its China’s fault; that is too simple. The issue is that we haven’t responded fast enough from a standards perspective to combat this hijacking. The solution is actually quite simple to implement.

stcredzero8• 16 years ago

Perhaps shortened URLs should be a standard? This could be managed in the same way DNS is.

wheels• 16 years ago

The problem is that what "we" really want is to be able to mail, chat, play games with, send photos to and do other random stuff with our friends. What a subset of geeks want is an open architecture that with fine-grained privacy controls. The average person wants that about as much as they want to ensure that they have access to the source code of their operating system.

Social networking requires a critical mass; the critical piece of building an open architecture isn't writing the software and putting a site up, it's convincing enough people to join to make the experience worthwhile. And for that you need a better carrot than geek fodder.

DrSprout3• 16 years ago

> What a subset of geeks want is an open architecture that with fine-grained privacy controls. The average person wants that about as much as they want to ensure that they have access to the source code of their operating system.

That's extremely condescending. Everyone I know wishes they had better control over their privacy on Facebook. The problem is that properly understanding and maintaining Facebook's current privacy controls would probably take several hours a month of analysis. That's intentional - Facebook is making the privacy controls too complex, and changing them too frequently for anyone to manage them properly.

roc2• 16 years ago

While users just want to do some simple things, they do care about the downsides and annoyances (that we know grow directly from lock-in). FB people already grumble about privacy, the meaningless of 'likes' and 'friends', the annoyance of all those third-party apps spamming friends of the player, etc. They're ready for change. They may not care about 'how', but they absolutely will care whether the next destination has those problems.

Sure, you need to wrap features into the protocol that will appeal to FB people. You should absolutely take the opportunity to solve some real problems. But the open architecture is crucial to protecting privacy. Without competition, no flavor-of-the-month network has incentive to put user needs ahead of its own wants.

balakk• 16 years ago

You've invented Opera Unite. As usual, opera's way ahead of the curve.

stcredzero8• 16 years ago

Not exactly. This is something that could be built on top of Opera Unite. There would have to be a lot of functionality implemented to make it viable.

dpcan• 16 years ago

There is an enormous opportunity here for a simple social networking startup to pull the rug out from under Facebook.

Just look at history. MySpace went from hero to zero in the blink of an eye.

fizx• 16 years ago

Yeah, but Myspace was incompetent.

david927• 16 years ago

And Facebook is becoming evil.

strebler• 16 years ago

Facebook, it's the new ICQ. Only a matter of time...

greyman• 16 years ago

Hmm...could ICQ inject itself into other websites?

piguy314• 16 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, and I may very well be, this new facebook paradigm shift is just friend feed on steroids, and since facebook didn't create friend feed, they bought it, can't somebody come a long and just make a new version of friend feed that embraces authentic openness instead of this command and control, top down, DRM vendor lock in dystopian reality that corporations seem to love so much.

fhars• 16 years ago

The german (alledged facebook ripoff) MeinVZ/SchülerVZ/etcVZ seems to do something in this direction with its OpenSocial interface. Instead of exposing your real account, you can generate additional pseudonymous personas that look just like OpenSocial accounts for external apps, but can only access those data from your profile that you actually authorized for this persona. This dos not address the data export problem, but helps keeping the things a user want to keep private private.

I think this is a beneficial effect of the rather strict data protection laws in Europe. Especially since one of the *VZ properties explicitly targets minors, they had to come up with a novel solution that actually takes user data protection into account.

spazmaster• 16 years ago

That was a good read. I haven't heard many positive things about Facebooks new plans but I like the new features (ie. instant personalization). If this can make my experience of websites more interesting and relevant I'm all for it.

But like Jeff Jarvis says: Facebook should give us the control of which sites get instant personalization etc. It's like walking through a mall and every time you enter a shop you're not sure if you're wearing clothes or not.

mcantelon• 16 years ago

Google has been pushing OpenSocial, a truly open (multiple provider) and deeper version of what Facebook is now offering, for over a year. It's a chicken or egg problem, however. FaceBook can deliver more traffic now, but the tradeoff it you end up helping promote FaceBook's ownership of the social graph.

anshul• 16 years ago

No, the chicken and egg problem is not what is wrong with this one. I was one of those excited about open social pre-release but it's release was riddled with all kinds of problems[1]. If google had gotten it right at the start, it could have really taken off. If google can still get it right and demonstrate cleanly how one can make a secure open social based site, it still has a very good chance of taking off. It's a good idea but I am not so sure about this particular implementation and it's details. Google or somebody probably should do an OpenSocial 2.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial#Criticism

alexandros• 16 years ago

This is a very insightful post. At the end of the day, having some company (especially one run by a volatile 25-year old) be the intermediary between me and my online identity just doesn't work. My identity should play by my rules, not theirs.

necrecious• 16 years ago

The best part of the post was the "Jersey Shore" become a fan on Facebook ad.

I am not quite sure what it is mocking, but I like it.

grrrr• 16 years ago

We so need an open & portable way of managing our social information online. I use OpenID to manage online authentication across different sites, and am pleased with this. I have a choice of providers, or I can manage it myself. But, it is limited to managing basic authentication, and is a long way from a repository for all the other types of social data that are needed for a full online identify.

Surely there is a market opportunity here? And whatever happened to opensocial?

Glide• 16 years ago

Apparently open social went 1.0 very recently.

http://blog.opensocial.org/

izendejas• 16 years ago

Clearly, the inability to exert full control of your profile on Facebook is very problematic esp. since your average Joe doesn't realize this, but this is a ticking time bomb and it will explode with a far more destructive force than Beacon/gBuzz. When that happens, I truly, truly hope people wake up and demand more controls (and demand opt-out by default!!!).

Their opt-out-by-default (that is, they opt you in) policy as well as Google's--anybody's--drives me nuts! It is EVIL! They argue that they provide you with value but who are Google and Facebook to decide what value means to you and when you should have it shoved down your throat? We own our data, and we get to decide who to share it with and when as we go, not by default.

I agree with J. Jarvis, Facebook is clearly thinking about themselves and the opportunity to finally bootstrap and rule the ever-so-elusive semantic web--that's really what they're building if one thinks about it w/ their Open Graph protocol. They want to rule this upcoming decade, they want to cut into Google's ad revenue with machine readable content, explicit interests, real identities, "personalization", etc.

hugothefrog• 16 years ago

Sounds like this guy wants exactly what the Mine Project is trying to deliver: http://themineproject.org/

sunchild• 16 years ago

Jeff Jarvis is right, except he shouldn't be so confused about why he's right.

There have been proposals for intermediated privacy settings controlled by users since the early 2000's (at least). The problem is that commercial websites never wanted to put that control in the user's hands.

Now Facebook "releases" what is essentially a siphon on your online activity, and the tech press lauds it as some kind of innovation.

Some days it seems like everywhere I turn, I see people doing the exact opposite of what is good for them. It's really bizarre.

pasbesoin• 16 years ago

There is a technological aspect that the user can or should be able to control, although it by no means addresses all the concerns. Simply firewall your Facebook access away from your other online access. It's annoying that browsers let so much information bleed between connections and provide either poor controls of same or poor promotion of such controls where they exist.

Currently, I have my Facebook access running through one browser that is doing nothing else. I use other browsers for other access. I would disallow Flash "super cookies" except that that borks a few other sites I access, so I wipe them at each shut down. (I'm also not entirely trustful of Adobe's online control panel and "black box" implementation.) I'm now considering controlling them yet more aggressively, as I see them as a means of cross-browser communication during the course of access that takes place between wipes.

All that aside, I too am becoming quite uneasy with Facebook. Opera's Unite continues to intrigue me, and if I can shake some time and energy free, I'd like to look at that more, not just or primarily for myself but also for friends who may want something "simple" to implement that places their data under their own control.

Most, however, won't want to leave the convenience -- and the "games" -- of Facebook. At least their browser should keep Facebook locked up in its own little pen, segregated if and as they wish from the rest of their online access.

Jeff Jarvis: I want the opposite of what Facebook just did

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