User "Hunger" made some nice clean-up work on http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas and added a link to http://lifesocial.org
I was quite impressed by the work LifeSocial seems to already have implemented. It's pretty much the kind of technology Ted and I have been talking about: true encrypted peer-to-peer social networking. Well. So far the good news. Now the bad news. I kept looking for the download button over and over. Nothing. It's not open source. It has been presented at this year's CeBit fair and received various reviews in German press but it's undisclosed as yet and intending to become a "start-up." Okay, we all like making money, but we in the free software world will have lost another battle if by the time we have a Facebook lookalike solution the people are already migrating away to the new "Skype" of social networks: A proprietary exe that you load to your PC in order to do distributed encrypted social applications (and the plug-in interface looks quite powerful) but you can never be sure it is indeed working for you, not for somebody else, because you don't have the source. We the geeks will say, hey, you can't trust that, but the average user will embrace the powerful next gen of social networking and by the time people like Ted and I get our apparently not so revolutionary ideas into actual code, people will not care as much. They already have LifeSocial (or something else if there are more commercial players ready with this). Maybe they will prefer a free software as much as they prefer Jabber over MSNICQ, but the majority of friends will not be on it. In other words, if we don't put something revolutionary out there real quick, it may be too late. We'll be ready with yet another php thing when Facebook et al are already on the decline with early adopters moving on to the next big thing. My impression of the situation. -- ___ psyc://psyced.org/~lynX ___ irc://psyced.org/welcome ___ ___ xmpp:[email protected] ____ https://psyced.org/PSYC/ _____
