Facebook alternatives spreadsheet

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjEncbAI_BjbdGJXNTY1bHpGS2o0U29ablR6R1ZSTkE&hl=en

by Raphael • 16 years ago

38 24 16 years ago

spreadsheets.google.com

samratjp• 16 years ago

Wow, a very active spreadsheet without a clear reason as to why do this? Can I ask what this is for please?

Raphael• 16 years ago

Many geeks are clamoring for alternatives to Facebook in light of privacy concerns, so it would be useful to see what developers are working on.

fredoliveira• 16 years ago

While I kinda understand what you're going for here, I feel compelled to point out that while there is a feeling of angst against Facebook from a few people, it is still the de facto social network today whether we like it or not.

It's going to take quite a bit for it to actually be substituted by another platform. My guess at this point is that all this discussion will make Facebook adapt, not necessarily die.

gnosis• 16 years ago

Lack of privacy was the foremost reason I quit Facebook. But I'm not sure any of these alternatives are any better on that front.

It would be nice to have some sort of verifiable guarantees that these companies don't use, sell, share, or give away any of the information they collect from me and about me and my circle of friends.

It would be even better were they mathematically incapable of collecting any of this sort of information at all. I'm envisioning maybe some combination of Tor (or maybe anonymous remailers) and social networking, where not even the owners of the network know who's talking to whom and what they're saying (at least that's how it's supposed to work in theory).

The problem is that many of the value-added features that social networking sites provide rely on knowing something about the participants and who they're communicating with. And the more of this knowledge the site has, the more useful/fun services it can provide.

So it seems that social networking sites and real privacy/anonymity are diametrically opposed. So I'm not sure how useful a completely anonymous and private social networking site would be.

Still, no doubt there's lots of room for improvement from a complete privacy-invading site like Facebook. And some sort of happy medium might be reached where a site is much better than Facebook on many privacy-conscious fronts and yet not be completely anonymous and privacy-respecting in every conceivable way.

ynniv2• 16 years ago

My vote is for something based on Google Wave (protocol). Standards based, distributed, scalable. Similar to email, you can own your own server (and by proxy, data), but still have realtime updates. I pointed this out when Wave was announced, but most people were obsessed with the hype of wave to understand the possible applications of the framework.

http://ynniv.com/blog/2009/08/google-wave-is-not-email-it-is... (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754193)

(Edit: BTW, OpenSocial is also XMPP based with a web frontend)

axod3• 16 years ago

Wave is just another boring protocol. Protocols aren't hard. They're not valuable. It's not rocket science.

Building something people need is valuable, and getting people to use it is very valuable.

That's where Wave failed IMHO.

ynniv2• 16 years ago

Wave is just another boring protocol. Protocols aren't hard. They're not valuable.

Yes. Agreed. Please don't invent a new one.

Building something people need is valuable, and getting people to use it is very valuable.

Yes. Agreed. Someone else already did the "boring" work (and has been bug fixing it), so why not build upon that? Grab some code right here: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/

You know what users don't want? A Rails app thats "like Facebook but OPEN". Or basically any solution based on scraping or polling, which will never scale. An application of Facebook quality is not a quick hack, and making that app distributed is way more complicated.

People are currently using Facebook because Facebook is a good product, and took a lot of effort to get there. There were a number of competitors available to them, which did not catch on. Statistically, any new effort will also fail. So whatever you do, do yourself a favor and pick something that's pretty close to Facebook already, and work your way from there.

frisco• 16 years ago

It was an interesting list for a little while. Now people just keep blanking the spreadsheet. See: Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

rythie• 16 years ago

There is a fairly big list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi... including traffic numbers

aeontech3• 16 years ago

There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_micro-blogging_se...

fairlyodd• 16 years ago

Well, you can definitely build a facebook alternative -- it will take a while, and it'll be probably not be up to par with what the top-notch talent at fb dishes out, but anyway, you'll build it. It is there. How would you convince people to use it? Without the people, the technology is bunk. I have hundreds of friends all locked into FB - a mass exodus is definitely not possible.

I think that FB has grown beyond a point where any other network can compete in the short run. The more important thing is that FB needs to realize they have attained a size where they need to care about social responsibility and be governed by certain policies. All these attempts by the site to ram down new social values into our culture is what needs to change.

minus1• 16 years ago

"I have hundreds of friends all locked into FB - a mass exodus is definitely not possible."

Replace FB with MySpace and reconsider.

aeontech3• 16 years ago

What about http://identi.ca and Tornado [http://www.tornadoweb.org/] (friendfeed's server that facebook released?

Oh, and Plurk [http://www.plurk.com/], if you're not just listing alternatives that can be federated/self-hosted.

leif• 16 years ago

What on earth does Tornado have to do with replacing facebook?

aeontech3• 16 years ago

I thought the question was about alternatives to facebook. Using Tornado you can write one. That's all.

ivankirigin• 16 years ago

A listing of social networks without a column for number of active users misses the point entirely.

robryan• 16 years ago

I think the key is something that will start by having the option to air everything you do on it on facebook also. People would be more open to change if it meant they could still keep up with both in the interim.

I know when facebook was just starting out with people I know that a lot were happy to post actively on both, same with Twitter/facebook now. Long term I don't think people really want to but when something is new definatly.

The other issue is monetising the new site, your selling points are also your ones which make being advertising supported hard, I think the aim would be to keep lean unlike the monolithic structure facebook has today.

aneil• 16 years ago

2peer is a distributed peer-to-peer social network, similar to diaspora. It has downloadable Windows and Mac clients: http://2peer.com

Facebook alternatives spreadsheet

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