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."
Thrid: (Score:0, Interesting)
Any company whose profit is distributed unfairly should be sized and turned over to the public sector where it will be administered to best fit the interests of the proletariat.
really people, let the free market work. If Facebook does go down catastrophically, then it will show people that open standards are indeed necessary. Much like how Microsoft now uses an XML based format as its default document format after consumers threatened to run when they realized that their old corrupted documents were unrecoverable.
The future is tiny screens? (Score:2, Interesting)
What seems to be happening lately is that the "Web" companies are trying to force small phone-screen layouts onto big-screen machines. That's what "Metro" is. Even Mozilla has a similar thing in the works. (The menu bar moves to the bottom of the screen and becomes darker. New!)
The other big trends are slaving everything to the "cloud", whether it needs it or not, an anal-probe level of tracking, and an "app store". The goal seems to be to create closed ecosystems with no escape. It worked for Apple.
Not much in the way of new capabilities comes with this. Before Siri, there was TellMe, which was voice-driven, speaker independent, and useful for movies and driving directions, and Wildfire, which was a very nice voice oriented phone management system. Microsoft bought both and trashed them. TellMe shuts down at the end of this month. Microsoft instead suggests using Bing from your smartphone. While driving?
What we're really getting from smartphones is automation of the banal. Ten years from now, search engines will still be around. There's a market for being able to search through all the publicly available information in the world. The more banal stuff, the "social" stuff, will move to phones.
Tablets are output-mostly devices, and as such, tend to be used more for entertainment than work. Then again, as work moves to "machines should think, people should work", work computing may become more output-only.
Re:wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Friend-face (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, and I have to say, I can't really see that the economic effect would be that great either (impact on any dot.com 2.0 bubble aside). If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, just how would that have any large effect on the economy?
Facebook wouldn't disappear and neither would your data.
Their assets (your information) would get sold to someone, who would data mine it, and then advertise to you in ways that Facebook couldn't without losing the public trust.
shareholders (Score:4, Interesting)
Bwuahaha... yeah, right.
Author is missing the elephant in the room. He's thinking Facebook exists to serve its users at all. It doesn't. The users aren't the customers, they're the product. Facebook treats its users like a meat plant treats its cattle: Just well enough that they make a good product.
Google could've really shaken up FB, but they opted to copy it instead.
I will tell you what will destroy Facebook: A FB-like Dropbox-frontend. Something that allows you to share whatever you want to share, blurring the boundary between local and cloud by making "the cloud" just a directory on your device.
Dropbox (or any other cloud service) has the potential to replace FB by integrating with any and all local apps, giving you a "share this" button on everything that simply puts the file into your Dropbox public folder and notifies your social graph.
The entire business model of Facebook is built on holding your data hostage. Unless they were to become really threatened, they would be stupid to change that.
But a company whose business model is built on charging you for sharing and storing data would have you as the customer, and interested in keeping you happy, not the advertisers. Of course, this also requires something much more difficult than passing a stupid law: A change in user mindset. People would have to get used (again) to actually paying for something.
Re:Here's a radical idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
people running their own blogs is much more vulnerable to decay and disappearing, pretty annoying to find a post that links to a dead post that was popular guide for doing some thing xyz.
A blog post really isn't the best place to host a how-to IMO. It only has two strengths over a static page: You can edit it and update it, and people can write comments other people might find helpful. But comments can be helpful or not depending on who's writing them. They can't give bad info, be spam comments, ect.
Guess what: Instructables is another social network. It's just less blatant as one.
Take your how-to, type it up nice and clear in OpenOffice, do some basic page layout with the pictures, and make a PDF out of it. Give it a version number. Now host your PDF. If you update it increment the version number. If your guide is really that great it will eventually end up on the Net in a torrent and when you update it if people are following your work those torrents will magically update, too. People who don't stand next to the stove/wood-working bench/soldering table with an iPad or a laptop will appreciate this. Rather than referring to your blog page they can print it out for easier reference and it wont look weird. They can stick it on a flash drive as a single file to back it up for offline viewing.
and there's a cooperative corporation model the guy is suggesting(users as owners),
That post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to social network fragmentation and stagnation. That idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to this particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) Someone will try to find a way to control it and make money from it
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it (teh terrorists can communicate too easily!)
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid ide
The end of Facebook? (Score:5, Interesting)
Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the April 2012 competition [consumerist.com] to be voted the worst company in the United States
Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook [wsj.com], says:
"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."
There's more like that in the article.
Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site [oregonlive.com], Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox [mozilla.org] with the NoScript [mozilla.org] add-on), but most people don't know about them.
Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.
On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.
Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care [facebook.com], or did the company offer something to be "liked"?
A few problems with Facebook: Richard Stallman wrote a short list of things wrong with Facebook. [stallman.org]
How much information does Facebook keep? Read the December 13, 2011 article, Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages [threatpost.com].
What do people in other countries think? The May 14, 2010 article, Facebook is not your friend [guardian.co.uk] gives one idea.
The June 15, 2011 article, The End of Facebook [forbes.com], and the June 14, 2011 article, Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? [telegraph.co.uk] give others.
Most people don't understand the problems that may occur. For example, consider the March 28, 2012 article, Teacher's aide says 'no access' to her Facebook; now legal battle with school [southbendtribune.com].
This April 4, 2012 article would be funny if it weren't so sad: Woman arrested for assault based on Facebook photo [thestar.com]. Quotes:
"Aston
Defending herself required a "... court appearance and several thousand dollars in legal bills."
Open source will prevail. E