On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 14:59 +0200, Carlo von Loesch wrote: > 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.
My feeling is still that most users have latched onto the idea of doing social networking as a web site. I don't think they'd really use a Skypeified Facebook replacement, and the people who want to use a federated secure social networking system wouldn't use something non-free. This is more encouraging than worrying, because it shows that there is actual interest in what we're trying to build.
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