Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/25/onesocialweb-appleseed-elgg-insoshi/

by michaelchisari • 16 years ago

18 20 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

michaelchisari9• 16 years ago

For reference, here is a screenshot of my Appleseed newsfeed:

http://goo.gl/RjD3f

c1utch3• 16 years ago

Although I am cheering for every Facebook alternative, the UI in your screenshot needs work.

michaelchisari9• 16 years ago

What do you suggest? Often people take issue with the color scheme, which is understandable, a default theme for an open source project needs to find a reasonable balance between good enough to use and ugly enough that people want to change it. It's important that people have the desire to "brand" their node, so as to avoid confusion.

Appleseed is fully themable using CSS, and keeps a clear separation between logic and presentation, so any designer can make it look any way they'd like.

However, if you're speaking more to the actual user interface, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on what you find to be an issue.

gsivil• 16 years ago

Can you please tell us about any Facebook's alternative UI that does not "need work"? That something "needs work" is one of the most obvious comments that somebody could think of. Everything needs work. It would be more constructive if you could provide us with some points that the appearance of that network could be somehow better.

joe_the_user5• 16 years ago

The approach of OneSocialWeb seems to be to define and extend existing standard protocols. This general direction seems appealing to me but in anycase, it's one extreme of possible approaches.

With Elgg or Insoshi, a "social networking engine" isn't particularly different from a generic CMS. In this sense, Drupal might be the leading alternative to Facebook, since it's dominant in its field (you could argue for wordpress too). And maybe that's an idea. An alternative to Facebook is to add a protocol to several common CMSes that would let you aggregate you friend's posts - Tie-together all the world's BBSes into a bullwork against Facebook. Anyway, a pure CMS where you sort the protocol later is the other extreme of approaches.

Appleseed and Diaspora seem somewhat in the middle of these approaches. They sort-of have protocols but don't seem to be protocol driven.

michaelchisari9• 16 years ago

Appleseed is built to be protocol agnostic. It abstracts out the protocol to a series of event triggers/hooks. It can even juggle multiple protocols at the same time.

This was a deliberate decision, because we're still waiting to see which protocol will win out, so once that happens, by design, it's much more trivial to move Appleseed over to that protocol in a seamless way than other similar projects.

joe_the_user5• 16 years ago

Which protocols are you testing? Which do you like?

bmurphy2• 16 years ago

There are no Facebook alernatives. My friends and family are on Facebook. They are not on ANYTHING else. Until that changes, which I suspect it won't, nothing else will be viable.

michaelchisari9• 16 years ago

For now, yes. But the history of the Internet is one of distributed solutions winning out over proprietary walled gardens.

For instance, a lot of people are on niche or community-driven social networking sites, alongside facebook. If those sites could communicate with each other, facebook would lose a lot of mind share.

bmurphy2• 16 years ago

You're right. But it's not happening now. I don't see it. Who are the alternatives everybody is flocking to? They don't exist.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hopeful for a new world of open protocols and you controlling your own data, but I just don't see it happening right now.

Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives

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