Jeff’s NewsCloud Journal

Breaking Open Facebook with Open Source Software

October 30th, 2007 | by jeff | | Post to NewsCloud »

While privacy and open society advocates have been concerned about the dominance of Google’s search engine for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook‚Äôs growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends and colleagues online. Personally, I‚Äôm concerned that one corporation controls so much information about the detailed personal activities and connections among individuals. With Microsoft’s recent $240 million investment in Facebook, the company has all the capital it needs to further its grand ambitions.

Earlier this month, Facebook Inc.‚Äôs CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to open up Facebook only by making member data portable and he gave few specifics or timelines. Last August, Wired published some unusual stories describing how consumers might link together a variety of third party services to emulate Facebook and ultimately calling on the open source software community to build alternatives to the service (see Replace Facebook Using Open Social Tools and Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up). I agree with Wired. Facebook‚Äôs service is stickier than search and email and has the potential to become more intimately involved in the way we conduct our social lives within our real world communities. I‚Äôve been reflecting on Facebook‚Äôs growing dominance for a while now so I decided to outline an open source software architecture to address these concerns.

Since last December, Facebook has grown from 12 to 47 million users. Since May, third party developers have launched more than 6,000 Facebook applications. In Canada, Facebook‚Äôs market penetration is so broad that many of my friends there use Facebook as a primary email service. It‚Äôs even inspired a song. In fairness, Facebook performs a unique social benefit by linking communities with the use of activity feeds, status updates and traditional social networking features. It’s earned its success by providing a simple, innovative and utilitarian service for managing lightweight communications amongst friends.

While the ubiquity of Google search and the growing success of its Gmail service is remarkable, there are many other search engines and email services for consumers to choose to use. While Amazon and eBay may dominate in their respective markets, they must work continuously to keep customers satisfied because the switching cost for consumers is very low. I can easily sell my stuff on CraigsList or buy from a variety of online or offline outlets. On the other hand, moving your profile and network of friends on Facebook is nearly impossible. Even if Facebook allowed you to export your profile, there is no way to maintain the activity streams with your friends.

Communities (online and offline) tend to conform to the activities that are routinely permitted or legal. There was a day when activists didn’t seek out permits for a protest or tolerate being placed in fenced protest zones far away from the appearance of public officials. The entire Federal regulatory system has evolved to corral activists within a constrained framework that limits their creativity and manages their effectiveness down. Similarly, Facebook decides what features and capabilities are allowed and disallowed. Facebook tightly limits the information that can be used by third party developers and the way in which applications can allow communication between users. Facebook controls which applications are approved can terminate accounts at any time.

While Facebook controls the cultural standards of its online community with its terms of service, the controversy over its Fuck Islam group showed that it can’t be counted on to consistently enforce its own rules. Although future applications may change this, the sheer ineffectiveness of the opposition group’s 77,265 members exposed how weak Facebook’s basic community features are for cohesive organizing.

As Facebook improves their email system, we can expect wider adoption of it. The company recently made search results of member profiles and initial application pages accessible to Google and other search engines. Facebook expects to grow rapidly and become a staple of our everyday lives. Even Google recently launched its popular news service as a Facebook application .

When one corporation controlled the American telecommunications system, our federal government broke up AT&T into smaller entities. When Microsoft announced the ill-named project Hailstorm to store all of our personal data online so it could be accessed anywhere, privacy advocates complained so loudly the company shelved the effort until its announcement of Windows Live! Google‚Äôs acquisition of microblogging service Jaiku provoked this reaction by the New York Times: ‚Äú…this opens serious questions about privacy, and about whether people are prepared to be constantly traceable, even if only by friends.‚Äù

While Microsoft’s CEO said social networking may be a fad (before investing $240 million in such fad and dismissing its own Wallop), its competitors have their own efforts (e.g. Google, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo) to take on the Facebook service and development platform. So far however, we‚Äôre mostly seeing the emergence of disconnected proprietary standards that don‚Äôt work together.

The build it yourself, “silo mentality”, of most software developmenters and startups has created a vacuum for privately owned services like Facebook to succeed. While there are some terrific open source platforms out there such as Drupal, Plone, WordPress et al., these projects are designed to be installed as individual standalone Web sites. It‚Äôs important for the open source software community to develop and encourage public infrastructure for social networking and the growth of online communities.

While outside the scope of my NewsCloud blog, I’ve posted a technical overview of my ideas for an open source infrastructure for social networking at Idealog.

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