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Ask HN: Brainstorming alternative Facebook models

40 pointsMaro37 comments

I was vacuuming my apartment, and pondering what "distributed model" would work?

The big thing in replacing Facebook isn't "distributed" or "central", its "what could make people switch?" Facebook came to prominence because of the elitist factor associated with top schools, the "poke" concept and its lack of "cesspool-edness" compared with MySpace.

At this point, I personally don't see how you could compete with Facebook on functionality, so what is your 10x improvement that would make people switch from Facebook to your new thing? People don't seem to be outraged enough about the privacy debacles as of yet to be making enough noise that a competitor could capture a large share just from that issue alone. (e.g. this is likely why Diaspora will fail, at least initially)

Knocking Facebook out of its top spot is much more of a economics (i.e. incentives, etc) and marketing issue than a technical one, IMO. People won't switch to a me-too; there has to be some compelling reason to move.

Absolutely. After all, Orkut and Friendster now offer almost everything people are talking about here as the bare minimum any competitor needs.

Facebook took off (after the college-only days) for two reasons:

1. For people on Myspace, it was worth moving because it didn't look like ass, and it didn't play music at you all the time. For people on Friendster, it didn't crash all the time.

2. For older people (still their growth area) it was a place that you were told could be trusted and private: you could put baby pictures on there, you could talk to people you knew, all without worrying about all those warnings your net-savvy friends were telling you about not putting things online.

You don't beat Facebook on 1: Despite Farmville, and despite their willingness to allow sheisty third-parties to clutter your news feed, they have a clean, attractive and functional site.

You beat them on 2. The reason people aren't outraged about the privacy thing is because they don't know about it. People don't visit their own profiles much, and they certainly never do it as someone else. Even if they try to lock things down they don't realise that "friend of friend" doesn't mean people-you-know, it actually means total strangers who happen to have made contact with one of the hundreds of people you know. The rules of the game were changed, and nobody told them.

That's where the opportunity is. Create a social network that is for friends only, with very few privacy settings and all defaulting to tight-as-hell, settings that are hard to unlock, and then advertise the hell out of that.

I'm sick of hearing "you don't want stuff public don't put it on the internet". The internet is bigger than that. I put my email into Gmail, on the internet, and I trust Google not to publish it. We should be able to create a trusted space where people can share things they want to keep private, and pledge that we'll make every effort to keep them that way.

Edit: Also, two things from other comments.

* If your solution needs people to have their own servers (or to make pretend that a bit of a big co is their own server), you've failed.

* If your solution includes the option of "public" comments and posts, you've failed. That's where this whole mess came from -- from Zuckerberg deciding that Twitter was hot and adding "public" to a Facebook that was built on private.

You beat them on 2.

Correct. A lot of us joined Facebook because we thought we had reliable privacy. To see data that we submitted become public after previously being less public is quite off-putting. I called it "contempt for customer" in another HN thread, and the reply was that Facebook's customers are actually advertisers. True enough. But commercial broadcast television, another advertiser-supported service, doesn't allow certain kinds of programming or certain ways of interacting with viewers (users), because advertisers don't want users to be upset and stop using. This is Facebook's long-term problem.

Couldn't agree more.

Personally, I would love to have something like a Yammer/Facebook that is invite-only and absolutely, completely private. In fact, it should not be searchable. You should not be searchable. And there's no getting around that. No one except the people I personally tell should know that I'm part of this network. The word 'clique' comes to mind when I think of what could beat Facebook at it's own game. In school, college, or in your job, you can only get into a certain clique or group if they personally invite you and deem you trustworthy and close enough to be part of the gang. On a network such as this, you could have different cliques - one for your family and relatives, one for very close friends, and one for your immediate family let's say. That's about it.

I often share things with a handful of my close friends via email. I don't put it on Facebook because I have a lot of just "acquaintances" that I don't want to share this stuff with.

I think a network where the concept of "adding a friend" doesn't exist, nor does the concept of "public" is probably what will take some fraction of people away from Facebook. If you mimic what happens in real life, you invite a whole bunch of friends and acquaintances to a Friday night house party, not to your family Thanksgiving dinner.

Maybe some view Facebook as the new cesspool.

This would be a great time for a competitor to capitalize on the bad press and differentiate themselves with a more compelling alternative.

I guess the question as always is how to reach the "normals"?

Yes, but the story of why Facebook is successful is more involved than that, and much more useful than you give it credit for.

Facebook started because Mark Zuckerberg was notorious for hacking yearbook pictures out of a sort of Harvard-official online phonebook (a "facebook") and setting a website to mash them up against each other in a hot-or-not style competition. Capitalizing on this notoriety, he was able to replace the original "facebook" directory, commenting to the Crimson something to the effect "I can do it better, and I can do it in two weeks".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-network-face... << fascinating, maybe not the best source

After that, yes, there is very probably some truth to the fact that it may have pandered to the elitism of ivy league schools, but the real lesson here is that Facebook had access to probably the best audience of any social networking site, ever -- a group of highly-social shakers and movers -- and was able to expand because there were similar needs in other similar schools. There have been probably hundreds of social networking sites that never failed to take off; this is, IMO, the key factor that separates them. The other thing is that, they were lucky about the network they were replacing; an online student directory translates very well into a MySpace alternative, as MySpace is arguably really a tool to interact in the world of MySpace. People were ready to be themselves online, they just needed good privacy control.

A startup like Diaspora does not have the luxury of a built-in user base like the Harvard student body. Nor does it replace a very extensible tool that everyone likes/needs. These are all very big disadvantages.

Here are my thoughts and questions some of you may find helpful. I consider myself an above average facebook user. Meaning, between my 250ish friends and I, I know more about the features and settings than they do.

1) Why would I leave my friends for a competitive product?

2) The UI/UX design of facebook is above industry standard. They're innovators in this space

3) Privacy is meaningless because normal people don't share provocative and sensitive information to begin with. So really, the privacy concerns some of you have is a non-issue with me and my friends.

4) Facebook with one sweep can completely change their privacy act and make everyone happy. See 4.

4) You can't make everyone happy. Of all people, we startup fanatics should know that. You won't make everyone happy with your competing product either.

5) Facebook should be your strategy for growing an alternative. Harvest information, learn from their doing. Copy and mimic every move, but improve on their downfalls. Because facebook is the best example of a functioning network, brand, and organization. Learn from it.

6) To have even the slightest chance of survival, you need to focus on a niche market first (fb for college students). This last step is going to the most difficult in todays environment with linkedin, facebook, yearbook, twiter etc.

Those are my thoughts for now.

I believe distributed to be unnecessary. Build almost the same thing facebook is now but be good.

Follow flickr's community guidelines and minimal design. Allow me to have a profile picture, give status updates, message friends, write on walls, create pages, groups, and share photo albums, nothing more nothing less. No games, no apps. Let me export and delete my data and make privacy settings clear and easily adjusted.

Get the right group of people in early and you have yourself a nice little business and an easy way to get lots of press as the facebook alternative. You won't be bigger than facebook but you'll make a smaller group of very passionate people happy and thats a good thing in the long term.

Edit: If you removed the t-shirt business from threadless you have a pretty early idea of what this might look like.

If you could trust a central service to be good, we wouldn't be talking about replacing Facebook, IMO.

They've broken our trust

/agree. There's already the 'right group of people' = the minority of Facebook users concerned with privacy. Get them on board, then build the community from there.

It won't be Harvard wanna-be's, but if it turns into another community like HN or Reddit (minus the frontpage and several subreddits), you'd be gtg.

Here's my for a discussion starter:

Somewhat like email. Suppose I uploaded some pictures, and I can specify whom to "send" it to. Sending in this regard means who can see it (eg. shows up in their stream OR can see it if they browse my profile page). You can send it to "everyone", or "people who work at X", or an explicit list of recipients [as with email].

The model behind such a service would be somewhat like email. When I post a picture and send it to everybody, it gets sent to my followers (and then shows up in their stream=inbox) and gets sent to my public stream, so that anybody visiting my stream can see it. When the visibility is restricted, it just gets sent to the recipient. Since the architecture is like email's it can be distributed w/o a central point of control.

One aspect to this is how a mass exodus / conversion to a new distributed platform could work.

A web-based tool could be developed that lots of geeks could install on their servers that would allow a person to export their Facebook data into this new service using the Facebook Graph API. Facebook would try to shut this down, so it would have be to have installed and operating in so many different places that they couldn't keep up. And the cool part is that as Facebook tries to shut it down, it will just build more and more media attention, driving more people to leave.

Brand it as The Facebook Exodus, or something like that, set a launch date, and then build momentum from there.

I don't think the problem is fundamentally about centralization, it's about ownership. At FB, the customer is the advertiser; the product is your personal information. Unless that equation is changed, you'll just get the same thing all over again.

To some extent, a distributed system helps solve the ownership issue -- there can be for-pay services and ad supported services coexisiting. But this space needs a business visionary (like Mathowie with Metafilter) or some new cooperative ownership model more than it needs technology.

Here's something of an idea, don't know how feasible (social networks isn't my specialty):

Each 'person' is identified by one or more email addresses.

Each person has a network page, which can be hosted anywhere.

Messages are sent via RESTful HTTP posts, and can be marked public or private -- public will get posted to the receiver's page by default, private won't be (but there's nothing to stop the receiver from re-posting it to their page, which isn't any different from email).

Each person can define groups of friends/contacts by the email addresses of people. This way you can keep friends/family/business separate, even if some people are in more than one group.

When you get a public message, you can easily forward it to any of these groups or individual people (or a combination).

By default you can ignore messages from people not in any of your groups (the site hosting your page would ignore it right from the HTTP post point). You could also set a specific subpage for messages from people you don't know (aka Formspring.me)

Not really sure where the money angle would come in (for whoever hosts the pages).

It would be perfectly possible (and, in fact, easy) to set up an app that people could "host" which would handle all their posting, status updates, events, photo's etc (indeed it's basically just a bit of an advanced blog).

You could easily put together a standard for sharing this information between sites; so people could either run their own page (mypage.com) or go with a provider (username.socialnetworkofthefuture.com) and yet information could be permissively shared.

The problem is as follows:

- aggregating data into a stream (a large overhead if every time you post it has to be sent out to X number of sites)

- finding people/friends (no single search - which is useful)

- getting people to understand the concept

That last one could be a killer blow...

To compete with Facebook and have a desirable product in this decade you have to go at it from another angle. It should not look and feel like a social network, friending, following should be a part of the service, not the focus.

Perhaps something like http://cargocollective.com/ where sharing, updates and follows are on a certain topic, in this case visual work.

You could start several of these topic based networks, where a UI is specific to the topic. A UI for sharing code, another for blogs, news, arguing, gossip etc..

Much of that already exists in the form of Github, Flickr, HN, Reddit, it just needs to be brought together with more consistent UIs. Your main feed of all the sites would be organized by topic. Instead of going to separate sites all with different UIs, you stay on one site and focus on content, not which site you're on.

If someone posts the same content topic on twitter and reddit, it should look all the same to the user. Nobody cares if it's twitter or digg, who runs the site, people just want the content. If some site doesn't include voting but you want to filter content for yourself by voting, then you can vote on tweets.

Some of the privacy problems resolve themselves, because your followers tend to stay in the topic, they probably don't want to know your personal life. Only data miners will link those things together.

For sharing personal details, gossip, a community builder UI could replace the difficult facebook privacy settings. Before sending out updates about your life, build lists just like you would in your AIM buddy list, send certain updates to one list, other updates to another list. Same person can be in different lists. People who get updates they don't want can remove themselves from your list by downvoting your updates on the topic for that list. A system where lists form based on likes, views, responses instead of manual controls would be best though.

I don't remember if facebook had options like this, don't want to bother to find out if groups do some of this, which means it's mainly a UI problem which makes it more likely that people will engage in the spam them all behavior.

So the distributed model already exists, it's just too distributed, makes it too complicated for users to use multiple sites simultaneously, so most people tend to stay on a few.

Facebook would have a lot of work to do before they could turn their service away from spammy personal life nonsense into something that makes a better connected web.

I have Flickr, Twitter, email, and blogs. All I need now is a half decent way to schedule events and a super flexible, privacy controlled index of friends and their blogs/twitter/flickr/email.

Exploration and friend discovery were huge draws from Facebook.

Except for email, that sounds a lot like Friendfeed ;-)

More pointers regarding this issue:

http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social

http://www.complang.org/dsnp/ (appears done, cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... )

http://www.get6d.com/developer-s-alpha-download

There doesn't seem to be any 'desktop-ready' way yet, unfortunately.

Instead of the "walled garden", make every person have the ability to program a node, and then have specialized websites where they could find other people in a category and connect their notes to other peoples (by exchanging some sort of key).

This would allow for a facebook-site to establish itself, but the existance of a "personal node" that was decentralized would allow you to cut ties with a particular site if you wanted to, and it would give you the ability to move towards greener pastures if you didn't like what the existing site was doing.

Whatever model you come up with, you'll need a way to have your friends see what you do to compete with FB, in other words, you need to build in that audience. That's the advantage of the walled garden that is FB. The second thing you need to do is to make it distributed, ie. non-walled garden. That's the weakness of FB right there.

Just submitted my blog post on this subject exactly--would love to hear your thoughts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330381

Add a miniblog, pics and games to wordpress and there you have it.

See http://diso-project.org/ and http://www.monkinetic.com/2010/02/the-future-of-diso.html -- announced in 2007 first, targetting wordpress. There're some things to download, haven't tried it though.

Open-source client software with strong public-key cryptography (built to a spec, like XMPP clients)

Web of trust for key verification

Content hosted on your friends' computers (similar to Freenet and Wuala)

I'd rather avoid XML-based protocols like XMPP. My co-founder wrote an XMPP server in his previous job and always complained it's a terrible protocol and the people responsible should be punished by implementing their own fully-compliant XMPP server =)

I couldn't agree more. XML sounded like such a great idea for this back in '99. Attempted implementation will disabuse you of that feeling very quickly ;-)

Replication of content would be important - you need to be able to see your friend's data when they are offline. Doing that securely would be interesting - but I suspect not impossible with current cryto.

Would need to supporting work both as as server application and a thick client.

Sounds a bit like an open Lotus Notes...

I was thinking along the same lines, actually, in terms of a "distributed Facebook"'s similarity to Lotus Notes. However, one of the big niceties of SaaS services is that you don't bear the cost of storing and transforming all the photos, videos, etc that you upload. Replication of this data would also get quite expensive as you gained followers. And then there's the problem of bandwidth in the US. Seems to me there are some infrastructural problems with a distributed Facebook model that require some more thinking than just "lets run a server on people's home machines" (e.g. Diaspora)

I'm not sure I'd be too worried about bandwidth issues - once content is replicated it could be served up from people who already have it rather than always going back to the original source. In fact, I suspect things would have to be done this way to provide some kind of resilience.

I think getting the security model for distributed content would be the crux of this kind of architecture, and I suspect that is probably solvable and would really benefit from an open architecture with multiple implementations.

"Welcome to a free exchange of information, the way it always should be."

http://woz.org/friends/

Heh--maybe what we need is a new GeoCities. Oh, wait:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocities#Litigation

wave protocol.

Wave was cool when it came out, but the initial reaction (hype) seems to have died off. I used it when it came out, but I haven't loggen in for months, and none of my friends have. Either that mode of communication isn't that attractive and/or Google introduced it poorly (Google-only, crappy web UI).

You know, I think they might have been thinking along the lines of a "distributed Facebook"-type thing when this came out. Anyone looking to replace Facebook should probably learn the lessons of Wave's failure before embarking on their own project.

Wave is probably too complicated for the average Netizen. I've personally only found it useful as a sort of real-time chat. Haven't checked my inbox in months at this point.

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