Posts Tagged ‘social networks’
Rivals Line-Up In Opposition To Fb
By Jonathan Frewin
Technology reporter, BBC News
Facebook has come under increased scrutiny over its privacy policies
The controversy over Facebook’s privacy policy is helping those developing alternatives to the social network.
Funding and users are flowing to services that claim to put members in charge of their personal data.
The rivals range from start-ups to more established firms working on the specifications for an ecosystem of open social networks.
Experts say Facebook may have little to worry about, despite 11,000 people pledging to quit Facebook on 31 May.
“Nobody has reached anything like critical mass in the same social platform area,” said Lee Bryant, from social technology consultancy Headshift.
“Facebook is like an entire web operating system,” he said.
Old rivals
There are already many well-established alternatives to Facebook.
Fans of the microblogging service Twitter might argue that it is poised to steal the site’s crown. It entered the world’s top 100 websites only last year, and is now sitting around tenth position globally, according to Alexa, a web information company.
But Twitter is more a micro-blogging site than a social network, where friends follow each other’s daily activities by default.
Alongside are a whole host of other early high profile innovators in social networking.
But many, including Bebo, Friendster and Myspace have seen their popularity decline in the last 24 months. None of these are still in Alexa’s global top 20.
The Diaspora team hopes to change social networking
Young upstarts
The latest round of privacy issues with Facebook has provoked considerable interest in some more embryonic social network projects.
Mr Bryant said: “Many people are looking to Diaspora as a new model – something which is standards-based, open-source and distributed.”
Diaspora was founded in early May year by four New York University students who aim to create “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open-source social network”.
It also caught the eye of investors on the Kickstarter website, which aims to find funding for creative projects. In just a few weeks, the Diaspora team has received pledges of $175,000 (122,000). They started out asking for just $10,000.
Max Salzberg, one of the founders, told BBC News: “Facebook is not what we are going after.
“We are going after the idea there are all these centralised services where people are giving up their personal information. We want to put users back in control of what they share.”
But Diaspora’s software is still in the early stages of development, and it’s not yet clear exactly where the project might go.
Another fledgling social network is OneSocialWeb that has the backing of mobile giant Vodafone.
Its designer, Alard Weisscher, told BBC News “We believe social networking is becoming so important … that users should have the right to choose their provider, be able to switch between providers … whilst owning and being in full control of their data.”
Common standards
Mr Weisscher said that rather than try to create a new social network, the OneSocialWeb team is trying to define a common language, called protocols, for communication between social networks.
This is an idea common to many such projects.
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I compare it to the 1990′s, when AOL and CompuServe were both very popular, but were ‘walled gardens’
Michael Chisari
Appleseed founder
Michael Chisari founded Appleseed in 2004, to try and build a simple social network. The question he pondered at the time was “If two sites were running my software, why couldn’t they interact?”
Like Diaspora, Appleseed’s approach is one of a growing band of “distributed social networking” projects, where anybody can set up a social network, and the different systems should be able to interact with each other.
Mr Chisari said: “I compare it to the 1990′s, when AOL and CompuServe (early Internet Service Providers) were both very popular, but were ‘walled gardens’”.
“Users on AOL could only e-mail other AOL users, same with CompuServe. Then, e-mail started getting popular and some people switched, but it forced people to ask why they were being walled off,” he said.
Mr Chisari pointed out that both AOL and Compuserve “were forced to open up … so that their users could participate with the rest of the world.”
Both companies have since faded considerably, and Mr Bryant at Headshift thinks something similar might happen at Facebook: “It’s a real and present danger. What people are looking for as a sign of that is a flocking behaviour.
“It was a flocking behaviour that built Facebook, and it’s a flock of people saying they’re going to a different social network that could lead to its decline.”
Competing standards
So can the new social networks establish a set of standards that they all stick to?
Mr Bryant said it is a sensible goal in the long term. “But over the short term, it will be a real battle.”
The founder of Appleseed has discussed universal standards with OneSocialWeb, because the software he developed has some similarities to their social networking language.
But well-funded Diaspora has indicated that it might use its cash pile to implement a different set of open standards called OStatus.
Those are being developed in part by yet another potential rival to Facebook.
That company is called StatusNet, which itself has created social networking software in use by 25,000 sites, with more than 1.5 million user accounts, according to Evan Prodromou, the company’s head.
“Any StatusNet site lets people from other (OStatus standards-compliant) sites follow the users there”, he said.
“The open protocols that we use mean our software works with much higher-profile services, like Google Buzz, Posterous, LiveJournal, WordPress, and Tumblr.”
Is there any chance that Facebook might sign up to such an open model as well, just as AOL and Compuserve did with E-mail?
Mr Bryant from Headshift thinks not: “The valuations we’ve seen for rounds of investment in Facebook mean they have to focus on making money soon.
“If they go down the open standards route, they would lose much of the lock-in that gives them value,” he said.
Closed meeting
And any such move would also assume that a common, open language can be established in the first place.
According to Mr Prodromou from StatusNet, a “federated social web summit” is planned in July to try and build momentum for one around OStatus standards.
However, he said, it would be “invite-only”.
Op-Ed: Why The Internet Should Win The Nobel Peace Prize
This year, a Chinese dissident and a Russian human rights advocate recent nominees for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize are joined by an unlikely, nonhuman contender: the internet.
A campaign to nominate the web, first put forth by the editors of Wired Italy, proclaims that the internet has laid the foundations for a new kind of society, in which massive interpersonal contact fosters consensus and understanding.
Predictably, the internets nomination was met with a wave of skepticism. After all, isnt it ridiculous to give one of the worlds greatest honors to an inanimate technology? A friend of mine asked, How about we give [the Nobel] to paper, since thats what all peace agreements have been written on?
The nomination seems especially ill-advised when we consider how un-Nobel-like online life tends to be. The primary use of social networking sites is meforming, or frequent updates about the minutia of peoples lives that one research group duly categorized as pointless babble. And if the internets most common asset is keeping us posted on what old high school classmates are having for brunch, then its risks may be more important.
Following a tragic case in which a couple allowed their baby to starve while raising a virtual child online, William Saletan warned that the internet lures us away from the real, grassy, human-populated world, toward a Terminator-esque dystopia in which digital life gains the upper hand, presumably leaving us all ignoring each other in favor of compulsive button pressing.
A lot of this bad press is misdirected. What it critically misses is that the internet is simply an enormous amplifier of human social behaviors, and that many of these behaviors are worth amplifying. Take the case of altruism. Countless demonstrations suggest that helping others comes naturally to us. Toddlers aid people in need without prompting, and even 6-month old infants prefer watching prosocial, as opposed to antisocial behavior.
Altruism is likely driven by empathy our tendency to resonate with the emotional and physical states of other people. For example, if youve ever had a friend whos both clumsy and culinary, chances are youve seen that friend burn himself on a hot stove accidentally. Watching this, you likely felt a pang of discomfort, and maybe even pulled your hand back, as if you, and not your friend, had been burned. My research and that of others has demonstrated that when we watch others in pain, we activate some of the same brain regions that are also active when we experience pain ourselves, suggesting that we really do feel their pain. I like to call this the Bill Clinton effect.
Empathy and altruism are powerful instincts that define our species, but they can also be shut off or amplified by a number of situational factors. A newly explored way to turn up altruism is especially relevant to the internet. People are much more likely to be generous when they are following the example set by others. Recent research has demonstrated that people can catch everything from happiness to obesity from each other. Moods and behaviors propagate through our social networks like strains of the flu.
In a paper published last week, researchers demonstrated that this contagion applies to altruism as well. After seeing others acting generously towards a public good, individuals were more likely to follow suit, and these influences spread through several degrees of separation in a social network, forming cascades of cooperative behavior.
The internet can spread positive cascades further than we could have previously imagined. Recently, the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile provided a dramatic example of this effectiveness. Following both tragedies, social media played a key role in creating an outpouring of private aid. Instead of updating about their own lives, people posted requests for text message donations to the Red Cross, a message that rippled through social networks quickly and broadly.
Similar altruistic cascades followed the South Asian Tsunami in 2004. Mathematically, altruism in response to these tragedies spreads in ways similar to epidemics. And like epidemics, contagion of altruistic behavior is most effective when it is distributed and fast-moving. The internet provides, by far, the most effective vehicle for us to catch positive social behaviors from each other.
When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrase, the medium is the message, he was describing how radio and television changed our lives by allowing us to share experiences on a grand scale. McLuhan believed that people were largely oblivious to the impact of media on culture, and that IBM was only then discovering that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information.
Four decades later, it would be hard to accuse Google (or us) of similar ignorance. We are hyper-aware of the extent to which the internet has altered our world. But what is the result of this change? Has it rendered us a bunch of pale, empathy-drained automatons? I think this opinion is too easy and too reactionary. Internet culture can amplify and spread our best and most human characteristics: empathy, altruism and communication. If this is the case, there may be reasons to seriously consider giving this years Nobel medal to an unlikely, interpersonal laureate.
Image: Dia/flickr