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From: | Blaise Alleyne |
Subject: | Re: [Social-discuss] What should GNU social be? |
Date: | Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:39:37 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0 |
On 10-03-04 02:38 PM, Ryan Prior wrote:
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Matt Lee<address@hidden> wrote:Should GNU social be a straight up replacement for existing social networks? I don't think so. Should GNU social include the creation of a protocol for decentralized, encrypted communication between social networks? I think it should. . . . We may decide to create a simple, Facebook-type UI as a demo for one of the possible applications of GNU social, but let's also consider the future and other ideas for social software.Hey Matt, I agree with you totally on your second point, but I think that we do need to create a straight-up replacement for existing social networks. The #1 thing that I want to bring out of GNU Social is a response to the question "What else should I use?". If I see somebody frustrated with Facebook and have a conversation about how it's harmful to trust all your social data to a closed network, that conversation can only go so far: whereas I can suggest to a disgruntled Windows or Mac user that GNU offers a great alternative, I have no such offering for the unhappy Facebook/Twitter/Myspace/LinkedIn user.
I agree with both of you, in that GNU Social should be so much more than a Facebook replacement, but that a Facebook replacement may be necessary... but we can't underestimate the social challenges of creating a replacement that don't exist elsewhere. Daisycha.in might give us a free software social networking service to use, but it doesn't solve the problem of communicating with other people if other people aren't on Daisycha.in. See Identi.ca/Twitter... I'm very active on Identi.ca, but I also feel the need to maintain a presence on Twitter because there are so many people I want to communicate with who aren't using Identi.ca. So, my first comment is just that we can't understate or underestimate the challenge of the network effect in replacing social services. A question arises though... To what extent would we be willing to connect with other proprietary web services, to set up a bridge (in the way to emacs is available on Windows, or that Identi.ca has a Twitter bridge)? I'm not proposing this, because I haven't thought it through, I'm just raising the question -- would we entertain the idea of creating a Facebook app, or using Facebook Connect, to allow someone to bring their Facebook activity over to a new, free social networking service? To connect with friends on a proprietary web service, to the extent that it's possible via their APIs? -- http://www.alleyneinc.net/ -- http://www.alleyneinc.net/
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