I for one would love to see an article here which gives a grid comparison of features that Facebook has vs. all the alternatives out there. Including a column for # of users.
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Everybody is on facebook and linkedin. Thats the feature which other networks can’t match.
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Well, I guess, …
but I’m completely reassured that Sheryl Sandburg is “accepting responsibility” for the problem created by her wienie boss.
/s
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Facebooks’ motivation for all of this is money. If a public-spirited replacement is to be made, it needs to either be something people are willing to pay for or it needs to be payed for by taxes from the public trough.
I’d love to pay for a subscription service that also covered my internet access, and made me a co-op member the way rural electric agencies work. Anything less than that, it’s someone else’s game I’d rather not play.
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check out Ello
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was created in reaction to the failures of commercial television and whose mission includes ensuring access to “telecommunications services that are commercial free and free of charge.”
Please take off the rose colored glasses! CPB is not some dreamy utopia filled with altruistic people. They have real budgets, real needs, real selfish interests. Don’t ask everyone to pay for CBP FB. Could you imagine a Secretary of FB reporting to the President? It may sound silly but governments do silly things too. And who’s to say the CPB FB would only employee angels that would never exploit user data? Let’s be realistic.
A regulated, monopolistic FB is not the answer either [kudos to the author on that!].
People are clearly angry on how FB treated their ‘private data’, but the same people also gave up their fundamental right to privacy when they signed up on the platform.
If you don’t like FB, then put on your big boy/girl pants and leave the platform. Make a decision; make a choice. Live with it. Maybe hang out on Boing Boing forums a little more? 
FB wouldn’t be the first Silicon Valley company to die off and it wouldn’t be the last.
Good Luck!
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I clicked, I scrolled, I saw: sponsored by Google.
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Interesting, but probably not for everyone.
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… that you didn’t know anything about it, you didn’t care, and she shouldn’t either?
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Maybe.
But
Imagine if that had been done ten years ago, and Trump was now in control of it.
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Don’t be silly… We all know now that if we give intrusive powers to the President, no later President would ever dream of misusing them.
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Time to Walkaway.
Yeah, I think email has always been the clear answer to this question (which many of us have been asking pretty much since Facebook began).
- no one owns the whole system, and no part of the infrastructure depends on a single vendor
- it already has more penetration than Facebook
- the security and privacy issues are well-understood and relatively well provided for (in some cases it even has legal protection similar to physical mail)
- people can use it to do most of the things they do on facebook, and people who want to play skeevy Zynga games can just use the apps, which is a privacy win even if they don’t know it
- it’s proven viable as a (cheap) paid-for service, and in fact many people today pay money for email service.
- it doesn’t artificially require people to have a single identity, or use their “real” name, or other bollocks of that type.
Unfortunately enragingly, there are a few reasons why email has languished, most of which could have been fixed long enough ago that Facebook might never have taken off in the first place.
- spam is still not dealt with as effectively as on other platforms
- ridiculous message-size and mailbox-size restrictions still exist in enough places that you can’t rely on sending messages over a couple of MB
- support for message formatting is wildly inconsistent
- setting up a mail client is clunky at best, and too often requires actual tech support
- strictly speaking, it doesn’t allow for publishing (“feeds” or photo galleries), although that is covered by usenet, and besides, if the UX were good enough, most people would be better off publishing that stuff via mailing lists, since it’s intrinsically much easier to have a handle on who sees what
- there is a problem with addresses being tied to corporate domains, as you can’t keep your address if you change employer / ISP / etc.; there are ways around this but they’d need to be standardised. (of course, Facebook messages are all tied to a single corporate domain too)
- the state of mail client software is an abomination; there is not one single option that is good enough and believe me I have looked
Some of these problems need things to change at the infrastructure level (the solutions exist, but aren’t consistently implemented). But the basic problem is the shitty client experience, and hot damn that’s frustrating, because Apple or Microsoft could fling together an engineering dream team to fix this in six months and not even notice the cost.
I wish there’d be, like, a Red Cross appeal or something to make email work.
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We need a nonprofit, public-spirited replacement
The trouble is that there are so many public spirits.
Obviously I want a replacement led by a group whose philosophy and values are similar to mine. But realistically, my values are shared with about 5% of the population.
And here’s where the unfairness comes in. A for-profit company is judged on the fact that it wants to make money first. I don’t expect it to cleave to my values, because the sole value is making money. it gets a pass when it doesn’t adhere to my values.
But a not-for-profit group is not so constrained. If it doesn’t adhere to my values, that’s not reality, that’s an ethical choice, and I will punish such a group vastly more severely.
Which is why I believe that only a commercial entity can achieve the universality that a Facebook has achieved.
(Disclaimer: I’ve never had a Facebook account because I couldn’t handle the feeling that it would obligate me to live a more interesting life.)
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In the business world, taking market share from competitors is much more expensive than creating/cultivating a market from scratch. On the Internet, it’s almost impossible. A common phenomenon across the history of the Internet is that the first form of an application that achieves a certain critical mass becomes culturally definitive of that application, creating powerful resistance to even technically superior competition. This is illustrated by how we now commonly use the word ‘google’ as a verb to denote the very concept of web search. Who then can hope to compete with that? The brand defines the whole concept.
Facebook became what it is because of the neglect of the open source software community which tends to be contemptuous of (or at best indifferent to) novice computer users, regarded such uses of the Internet as frivolous, and saw no need for improvement on the concepts of the mailing list and Usenet. The for-profit developers of Facebook, Reddit, Digg, et al recognized the potential market hidden in the novice user frustration with so much of the early Internet and built businesses around that. Now that Facebook has achieved a mass of eyeballs to where it has become the cultural definition of what it does --to the point where quite a few users no longer know the difference between the Internet and Facebook– it’s going to be extremely difficult for an open alternative to achieve any critical mass even if it’s technically superior.
To overcome the hegemony of Facebook requires reimaging the underlying concepts of the social networking/media application to such a degree that you supercede it like the car superseded the horse and carriage and thus re-capture the cultural definition of the application. But what might do that? My bet for this has been the Social-Semantic Networking concept of Netention and what I’ve come to call the Digital Tao, but these are concepts that depend on the future development of Semantic Web technology.
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Came here to say this. You said it better than I could. Thanks!
Well, yes, because the early adopters are creatives, and the platform has developed to accommodate them.
But the fact is there is the foundation of a social media platform here, with none of the baggage of Facebook. There is no reason why the accommodations there can not develop to accommodate other interests and groups.
I suggest contacting the organizers with the question whether Ello could serve as a more benign replacement for Facebook.
well, this got me to look at hubzilla and honestly it looks great to me. It is already feature rich beyond what I’ve come to expect of these upstart socialweb alternatives. For sure the UI is a little clunky, but not any more so than facebook imo. Probably it would be too much to expect every person to host their own “hub” but I can see this being just as accessible and useful as the ol’ FB is.
“My sole value is making money” is also an ethical choice.
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