On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 5:37 AM, stephen white <[email protected]> wrote: > I commented on the comic via the buddycloud developer area, and Jonas > suggested that I repost here. I apologise for my first post being a criticism: > > That comic makes it a lot harder than it needs to be. If I was explaining > this to my grandma, I would say "everyone's been using email for decades. It > works and it's proven...
Good point. > Now Google and Facebook want your information so they want you to use their > website, and now we have all of these privacy problems you keep reading about > in the news. Buddycloud does the same as Facebook but like email, so there > are no privacy problems because it's being done the way email worked for > decades" > I'd avoid strong language like "no privacy problems," as that might convey that whatever the FreedomBox provides will be flawless and without design issues that could present some privacy concerns. Just to use email as an example, there are concerns that even involve the human factor, such as that amusing (but perhaps apocryphal) story of the email mistakenly sent out to all employees of a company that began "My dearest, I am so happy that we have now found a private method of communication..." > That version of the explanation points out the established solid history, > then says it's continuing that history. The problem with the comic is that it > argues the merits of both cases, making people need to consider one or the > other as though they're on an equal basis. They're not. The centralised > Facebook approach is the design that doesn't have the history, hasn't proven > itself, and has the privacy issues. This is a substantial advantage that > shouldn't be wasted by "fair and balanced" arguments. > Facebook was started in 2004 and currently has over 600 million users, according to Wikipedia. Facebook has had incredible growth over this time, and has managed its infrastructure successfully, scaling to handle a population twice that of the United States. Given those numbers, it may be considered disingenuous by some for us to make claims that Facebook has no history in this field nor has it proven itself over the course of several years. I realize that for the FreedomBox project to become wildly successful it will need to have a PR team that promotes a positive, powerful image of the product and that downplays any successes of "the other guys". The thing is that most of us are used to hacking on technology in a world in which things generally don't grow much larger than "Geek Famous," because we usually wouldn't bother to put in the time; we'd much rather work on another cool new project. As the FreedomBox project starts to pick up some speed and makes it possible for armchair geeks to actually run their own servers, I think one of the best things the project can do is to be very honest and open about the services that our project provides as compared to Facebook, Twitter, GMail, LinkedIn, AIM, and the rest. We need to provide positive talking points (and hopefully some very nice looking charts and other graphics) that show exactly how easy it will be for people to run these servers and how much more powerful the FreedomBox will be than the services they're using today. Maybe some services like Facebook have a multi-year track record, while many FOSS distributed social networks are rather young (to say the least). Let's focus our efforts on the powerful talking points -- like privacy problems with Facebook -- and use those carrots to get people interested in the project and get them excited about purchasing and using the hardware. If we can create a powerful and simple-to-use product, all we need to do is get them to take that first "nibble" and they'll be hooked. --R _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
