Dealing With the Eventual Collapse of Social Networks 370
taskforce writes "There are good reasons to think web services like Facebook won't be around forever. If Facebook ever were to go down there would be potentially huge costs to its users. We can all take individual steps to protect our data and social network, but is there anything we can do to our economy to mitigate the costs of the failure of these services? The Red Rock looks at the role open source, open standards, consumer cooperatives, and enterprise reform can play. The author concludes that all is not lost, and that there's a lot we can do to reduce both the cost and frequency of failure."
His suggestions are pretty radical: "The first is draw up an Open Data Bill and pass it into law. This would (where applicable) mandate the use of open standards by firms, and also mandate that all data held about a user is downloadable by that user, in an open standard. ... The second is to reform the corporate structure of larger companies to include some directors elected by consumers, rather than just shareholders. Not all the directors, like in the Cooperative Group, and not even a majority, but just a small portion of the board — say one third."
backup your date to multisources (Score:5, Insightful)
You should treat every website like it might not be around forever.
If you store your photo's on facebook and don't have backups if it elsewhere, then you deserve what you get, if Facebook closes down.
Nice idea to have an "Open Standard" to get our data, but I don't see this happening.
Friend-face (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow Facebook is too big to fail, but MySpace can flitter off into the night without people caring? When we finally approach the end of the natural life of Facebook, people will transition into whatever the next big social media gathering site will be, little by little until Site A is empty and Site B is the new hot stuff. It's not going to happen overnight, no "rush to the exit", and definitely no need to legislate a "fix".
I have a better way (Score:2, Insightful)
don't upload everything to a "service" without having a backup, if it really means anything to you...
I've solved this problem (mostly) in my head (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything I put on a social network, I consider it "lost". I treat it like conversation. Growing up, there was never any expectation that my conversations would be archived. I treat social networks like that. Yep, Slashdot postings too. Once in a while I'll get some +5 that I think is worth saving, but even most of those aren't worth it. Even the several blogs or sites I've had over the years don't hold up very well over time.
Let's face it. Most of us aren't Shakespeare. Most of us have pretty boring lives. How do you know if you *do* have an interesting life? Somebody else starts a page for you. So that solves the problem right there. Just do nothing on social networks, and let somebody without a life do it for you.
Now, all of this is a separate issue from being able to "back down" your data. I have to admit I haven't done that with my Flickr pix. It's my one weakness. I really need to at least download the pix and burn them all one one CD. I have the raw data, but the selection of what was "post worthy" and the comments and metadata are the real problem. I'll take care of it one day, or my unremarkable life will end before somebody does it for me.
And now, to drive the point home, I'll post this AC instead of using my Karma +2 bonus account that I've had for 10 years.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
You do not have a FaceBook page (Score:5, Insightful)
This goes for all social networks (including Slashdot) but I will use Facebook as an example:
You do not have a FaceBook page.
No you don't.
Facebook has a page on you, which you update for them for free. You are a product that Facebook produces for its customers. The customers of Facebook are the advertisers, not you. This is not necessarily a bad deal for you. You get to show people Facebook's page about you, and derive pleasure from interacting with Facebook's pages about your friends. All for free.
But don't get upset when Facebook decides to improve things for its customers, because they can (and should) put them first. Facebook owes you nothing.
Regulating social networks seems like an exercise in frustration. What counts as a social network? Does my blog count? Do I need to let users download all their comments in an "industry standard format"? Do MMO's count? Can I download my +5 firesword?
Re:Friend-face (Score:5, Insightful)
Purely IMHO of course, but what does FB have that I would go screaming in the night if I lost?
Pictures? Got backups of those.
Meeting times and events? People can find another place for that. iCloud is free and has a good calendar function.
Meeting forums? Plenty of places for that, be it G+, Web forums, Yahoo groups, or maybe even having one's own website.
Watching what friends do on a site that isn't horrid on the eyeballs? G+ is stiff competition, and worst case, there is always firing up a website and a blog.
Random comments? Twitter is there.
Private messages? Yahoo chat, AIM, ICQ, and other chats are still out there. Barring that, there is always E-mail.
FB apps? I don't play them, so am not a judge, but I'm sure some large website, somewhere would happily create an API in order for a company like Zynga to slurp up dollars in micropayments.
What FB provides is just one single contact point. If it vanished tomorrow, people would just go back to what they used in the past, or perhaps just patronize Google+, which offers almost everything that FB does, coupled with a music store, storage space, E-mail, and apps.
Re:Data decays (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got a point, but that's a gross exaggeration. What did the 20th century give us? Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynman, Vonnegut... between them, dozens of books worth preserving, and that's just a tiny selection of major 20th century authors. It might be argued that the number will diminish over time (Feynman's physics lectures might not always be so great in light of newer work, after all, and god knows not all of Vonnegut's work is worth a damn) but it'll take a very long time for it to reach two.
Hell, there are centuries BCE that I think most scholars would say have more than two books worth preserving.
Re:Friend-face (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is it that there are an increasing number of people, who think that government can fix anything and everything I just making another law by which to control our lives? It seems that the more laws that legislatures of all jurisdictions make, the more lawless our society becomes.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:0, Insightful)
Mr. / Ms. Gamemaker spammer :
Have you decided to make a career of being a piece of shit ?
If so you are off to a good start.
What if they sell it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Facebook goes the way Myspace is heading, then the biggest risk is they'll sell your every private data to ChoicePoint, the NSA, and everyone else who fancies taking a look. They can't commercialize it now because people would leave the site, (at least not openly, but if those wiretap memos going around are true, secretly they already are). But once the company has no future and can openly piss off its users, then it becomes not problem selling that to every data mining company out there.
You created your data inside the service (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your suggestion is that often the data you want to preserve was created or discovered within the service, not externally. For instance, your Facebook friends lists, and the messages you've exchanged with people on Facebook, were probably created directly in Facebook, not exported from your home computer, unlike your photographs which you probably created and then uploaded. But even then, the captions for your photographs may well have been created directly in Facebook or Flickr, while your PC or phone thinks of them only as IMG00345.jpg.
So you need some way to back up your data from services that may not have been built for it. With Gmail, you can use IMAP to copy it down to your PC - does Facebook have anything better than screen captures available?
Re:Friend-face (Score:3, Insightful)
Whats interesting to me is (Score:4, Insightful)
as people I know started to sign up and use social sites more and more I stared getting less and less calls from them. Now I only get calls from a few of them. Don't get me wrong its not a bad thing as it lets me know who my real friends are.
Re:Friend-face (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do you mean those crazy ass regulations that say that household current should be 110v AC, gasoline should have a reliable octane level, and your bottle of Tylenol shouldn't include arsenic?
Or do you mean that crazy ass court system that tries and convicts criminals, and that allows you to defend the ownership of your property and ideas, and to defend your reputation from libel?
And yeah, government does have a role in regulating corporations specifically because we've seen time and time again that corporations will not act in the best interests of society as whole, will screw over their customers and clients, and will do pretty nasty stuff someone isn't watching over their shoulder.
Re:Facebook *and* Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook, maybe (but no, not really).
Google? Anyone claiming they can be replaced in 5 years just has NO idea how much work it really was to get to where they are today. The fact that it's trivially simple to search for something on Google and find decent results in 100ms does NOT MEAN it's a trivially simple thing to implement. It means they have spent an insane amount of time and money to make it trivially simple to use.
There are a LOT of search engines that failed over the years... but why? Because Google was so much better there was no reason to use them. Until someone makes something better, I don't think they are in any danger of irrelevance...
Here's a radical idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's avoid worrying about the collapse of social network sites by not using them to begin with.
No, really. Stop uploading everything to a third-party company so they can data-mine it and make it hard for you to get any of it back if their business plan fails. You want a presence on the Net? Run a blog on your own website. You can even pick the domain you really want to hand out then. People can leave comments, subscribe with RSS, communicate with you via this fabulous standard called email. Web hosting is cheap. You can add advertising to help pay the bill for it, no different than an ad-filled experience at existing social networks now is it? Still too expensive? Well social networks and blogs aren't a necessity of life, they're recreational things -- hobbies. Hobbies cost money, ask anyone who does model trains, remote control airplanes, woodworking, stamps, etc. If you don't want to pay for it maybe you don't want to do it that badly. Not everyone has to have a page on the Internet, not everyone who does necessarily has anything really to say. There's millions of ghost ship blogs their owners haven't written on in years.
We already have standards for moving this information around. It's called HTML, JPEG, GIF, all those web languages and filetypes you can open with any web browser.
What a non-issue.
What's a Facebook "user", anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're talking about "users" are you talking about the content producers / eyeballs - the little people whose social networks are expressed in Facebook and who've invested thousands of hours in Farmville and Mafia Wars? Or are they and their social networks "the products", and "the users" are the advertisers who sell things to those people? I can see how the advertisers might lose lots of money if Facebook content producers get bored or annoyed and go somewhere else, or do something else.
But for one of the little people, I don't see how there's a "potentially huge cost" to them if they get bored and leave. Ideally, they'd like to back up the contact information for their actual friends, and for some of their other Facebook friends, and back up their photographs, but if they've gotten bored and left that's an indication that the value they're losing is near-zero. If they get mad at an obnoxious Facebook policy and leave, there's some positive value that they're losing that's balanced by the negative that's chasing them out, but it's still their call. There's a "potentially huge cost" to Facebook if their content producers and eyeballs wander off, because they've got less product to sell to advertisers, but that's a problem for Zuck and the stockholders, not for the people who left.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:5, Insightful)
I would go as far as to say that if there's anything you consider to be of value on facebook, then you're doing it wrong.
It's just idle conversation and the odd photograph that you probably already have somewhere else, isn't it?
Re:Friend-face (Score:4, Insightful)
Personal responsibility is hard; it's easier to give up our rights in exchange for protection and favors from the government.
Especially because the people proposing something always want to give up someone ELSE'S rights, not their own. Of course, when two different groups want the opposite group's rights curtailed in opposing fashion...
Re:Friend-face (Score:5, Insightful)
In some countries (ie Europe especially Germany) the regulations are rather clear about most points though probably not all. The user owns his data and can demand a copy of all personal data and may request it to be deleted as well. There are a few exceptions and some room for improvement but basically this is the way I'd like it it to happen.
I provide temporary access to my data and ad viewing eyeballs in exchange for a service. If you don't provide this service anymore (or if I cease to want it) you loose any right to use it. Of course there may be some necessary delays (ie. data won't be deleted until all open payments are settled).
Access to data is a right "rented" with the provision of service. If the service is no longer provided or needed, any right to access or keep the data should be void.
Re:Friend-face (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh I don't know about that. A society with no regulations at all will fail just as quick as an overly regulated society. Are we striking a fair balance? Probably not.
Sure, there is some really stupid shit like hate crime laws, and cyber bullying laws to prevent hurt feelings on the intarwebs. However, there is also some pretty smart stuff like food and safety regulations (most of it) and putting on your farking seat belt and wearing a helmet.
Credit reporting agencies are mandated to give you all of your information. You can also access your entire medical record. That sounds pretty reasonable right? You would think you would not need a law for it... but apparently you do otherwise companies would deny you information because it creates an avenue for unjust profit.
An open standard might be going a little far because of how vague that might be, but it could as easily just be plain text. I don't think it is unreasonable to require a company to disclose upon request all information they have stored about you.
It might get problematic in separating any data that relates to trade secrets, proprietary processes, and 3rd party interactions, but I think it is sound in spirit.
In this case it sounds like the idea is not so different than number portability laws for telecoms. Perhaps the author wants people to have a legal entitlement to access and migrate any data held by one company to another? That's no so unreasonable is it?
The only way around it that I can see is that Facebook would have to outright claim copyright for all submissions, which might not go over well.
Trademarks property of their respective owners. Comments owned by the poster. © 2012 All Rights Reserved. Geeknet, Inc
That's at the bottom of Slashdot. Even though I own the comments, I cannot peruse or download all of my posts that Slashdot may have stored. It would be pretty nice to have that, and if Slashdot cannot be moved to provide it, a regulation to motivate that sounds good to me.
After all, the basic spirit of the idea is that you are provided free access to anything you own, and that includes any data collected about you... not such a bad idea to pushing forward as a basic legal entitlement in the early years of our Digital Age, IMO.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:5, Insightful)
Photos? My photos are on my hard drive.
Your hard drive probably has a lifespan that is much much much shorter than facebook's. Good luck.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:5, Insightful)
"The plan is to pave over the area and get on with our lives" - Futurama, construction worker.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:5, Insightful)
There is one thing I have on facebook and nowhere else: contacts.
Of course, for family and friends I have their email address / phone number someplace else (namely Google) but there are quite a few "acquaintances" that I connect with exclusively on facebook / LinkedIn / etc.
I'm aware I'm doing it wrong, but these are not people I'd email to in a regular fashion or at all. They are old coworkers, friends of friends I've seen once or twice, etc. Sometimes I go and see what they have to say on facebook to get an update of how they are doing. And sometimes we "connect" for good due to some shared interest / goal.
These people are in touch with me exclusively on facebook. If the whole thing was to go down I could not connect easily with half of the 'friends' I have now on facebook.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical troll.
Gosh, what a disaster it would be...
Who said it would be a disaster? You did.
...if you lost contact with the hundreds of "friends"...
Who said there was a hundred? You did.
...you don't even know
Who said I didn't know them? You did.
So all in all you're saying that what you're imagining I said is stupid. Way to go.
You see, social networking (not in the internet sense) is like everything else in life: There are no absolutes. Some people I know intimately. Some a little less. Some barely. Some I've just seen. Some I don't know at all. There are various degrees. Not binary.
What you're saying is that below a certain level of "connection" there is no value at all. Which is utterly stupid of course.
I know, it's a hard concept. Not binary. I'll give you some time to think about it.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is when the data is on MY hard disk it's under MY control, and I have the responsibility and power to replace it in time.
If facebook/flicker or any site decides to just shut down tomorrow without warning, I don't have time to react.
Hard drive's fail much more predictably then web sites.
Re:Friend-face (Score:2, Insightful)
"If facebook (and other social networking sites such as G+, LinkedIn, etc.) would vanish overnight without warning, would you have a way of keeping in touch with EVERY last one of your contacts on facebook?"
If you don't have phone numbers for those contacts then they're obviously not real friends so they don't matter.
Facebook is a toy, its not a real way of keeping in touch with people. If you really want to keep in touch with someone you phone them occasionally or even - *gasp* - meet up. Yes, there's a radical idea , meeting in person. Who'd have thunk it?
Improved productivity, for one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me a curmudgeon, but the immediate impact - after the shock and awe wear off - would be people learning how to elucidate complex points again. In the early days of Usenet posts were longer and better thought out. That trend carried into email when POP3 and offline clients meant you had time to compose your thoughts. Webmail shortened people's attention span, since you had to fire off your message before the page expired. Facebook shortened it again: you don't have to even have a coherent thought anymore as you really only need to stab blindly at the stupid "like" button and click on pictures people think are funny. Don't get me started on Twitter, but let's just say in a language where you only get 140 characters per thought you don't waste any of them on verbs (or often vowels).
If Social networking died in a firestorm, the 'net would be quiet for a bit. But perhaps people would get back in the habit of thinking about things more complex than whether or not they "like" the video of the funny cat.
Nah, who am I kidding? Those days are past, and each generation is stupider than the last one now. Yay us. Alright then, I'm off to wash my '68 Thunderbird while listening to Steely Dan on my transistor radio. Damn kids.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:4, Insightful)
Not phrased politely, but I would take the GP as sincere if only because he said what most of us (not addicted to Facebook) feel.
Take that or leave it, but honestly, my first thought on seeing this FP ran more along the lines of "A law to allow people to do something after-the-fact that they should have done all along? Fuck 'em, perhaps if FB goes down it'll free up some bandwidth during the day for actual work". And yes, we do have a no-facebook policy. And no, the company won't seriously risk the publicity of firing 2/3rds of its female employees.
Who said it would be a disaster? You did.
Umm, the FP did? "If Facebook ever were to go down there would be potentially huge costs to its users". Right up there on the FEMA-five - Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Flooding, Fires, Facebook-Outages.
Who said there was a hundred? You did.
Facebook did. The average Facebook user in 2011 had 245 so-called "friends".
So all in all you're saying that what you're imagining I said is stupid. Way to go.
You chose to defend what you consider a strawman. If you don't feel you fall into the GP's characterization of a FB user, then what s/he wrote apparently doesn't apply to you, so why argue the point?
What you're saying is that below a certain level of "connection" there is no value at all. Which is utterly stupid of course.
Why? I pass dozens or hundreds of people on my walk from the parking lot to work every morning. Some I even recognize, more-or-less, and a handful I'll even wish a merry "good morning".
And if each and every one of them died last night, I wouldn't even notice the difference on my way in today.
So no, real life doesn't work in a binary way, Facebook does, and I don't "friend" the drunk-at-8am guy who mumbles something cheery to me every morning from his regular spot on the park bench.
Re:Friend-face (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't have phone numbers for those contacts then they're obviously not real friends so they don't matter.
It is not all black and white, there are shades of gray. The good thing about the Facebook way of communicating is that it is not intrusive. If the brother of my good friend (which I occasionally meet at his place) wants to check up on what's going on with me he can. Otherwise he won't bother. If I don't want to check my Facebook because I don't have time, I don't have to. I'll catch up later or never. My choice.
Facebook is a toy, its not a real way of keeping in touch with people.
It is as real as any other means of communication. WTF does "not real" means anyway? You mean that whenever I send you an email it is "real" but if I post on your Facebook wall it is not "real"? Looks like you never tried Facebook or that you never got how it works.
If you really want to keep in touch with someone you phone them occasionally or even - *gasp* - meet up.
So every time there is something going on in your life, you phone EVERY one of your friends that might be interested by it? Every time? Gosh, I guess you don't keep a lot of friends then. Phone calls are intrusive by nature. It's not better or worse, it is just a different way of communicating.
Yes, there's a radical idea , meeting in person. Who'd have thunk it?
Radical idea: Facebook users also meet other persons in meat space. Who'd have thunk it?
Re:Friend-face (Score:4, Insightful)
Tried it, didn't see the point. If I want to communicate using text I'll send email or an SMS.
My dad tried email once and he didn't see the point, so he went back to snail mail. Do you see a parallel here?
Yeah , oddly enough thats what normal do with *real* friends.
I have about half a dozen real friends but is a lot better than having 100 pretend ones that merely stroke your ego on facebook.
Do we have to understand than you communicate with 6 people (your real friends) and never ever communicate with anyone else? Hint: Facebook was never meant to be the best way of communicating with your 6 best friends. Another hint: Facebook was never meant to replace all other means of communication.
Yeah , you see calling the real world meat space really does make you sound like some nerd loser who hardly ever leaves his mums basement.
Hmm. This site's motto is "News for nerds, Stuff that matters". So I thought you'd understand the expression.
Re:The end of Facebook? how to stop tracking (Score:5, Insightful)
"Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button"
Download a separate browser, such as Opera, and devote it exclusively to Facebook.
Much easier: don't use facebook.
Seriously, if you disapprove of facebook's tactics, why continue to use their products? It's like all the peopole here who whinge on about privacy on the internet, then also say how great Google is.
Re:backup your date to multisources (Score:5, Insightful)
When did people stop backing up shit locally they don't want to lose in a hard drive failure?
Not backup as in upload to fucking Facebook, or host on a cloud storage site, but as in having another hard drive to put the shit on? Am I a relic of a long-forgotten age because I have an external HDD with a backup of all my digital photos and documents?
I swear to Christ, it's like people have just gotten so fucking stupid since the advent of "the cloud", they want to find a way to shove it into every facet of their lives online whether it's practical or not. You can buy a 2TB Western Digital USB 3.0 external HDD for like $100, plenty big enough to hold every photo the average person has probably ever taken with room to spare.
Re:Friend-face (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think grantspassalan's rhetorical troll would cite any of the laws you mentioned. Clearly he was referring only to the stupid ones, but I really don't feel like feeding your straw man troll tonight. Feed him yourself, if trolls eat anything that you can legally feed them.
If someone says "all A are X" and you then say "but this A is not X" that is not a "straw man troll" reply,it is a perfectly value counter-arguument.
So the OP was the standard slashdot libertarian "teh government just keeps making laws for the sake of it in order to destroy our freedom", and the reply was pointing out how there are some good laws.