Hi all, We have a common goal. We would like people to control their destiny by moving from proprietary social networks to distributed ones (dsns).
However, social networks are like the Internet and the telephone, and unlike, for example, Mailman or PHP. Mailman and PHP are tools. You pick them up, use them, deploy them, then put them aside for awhile. A social network is only useful when used in collaboration with your friends and under daily engagement. A social network has very different adoption dynamics from the tools that you used or helped develop. For a new social network to succeed, its adoption cannot be incremental. It has to be a rapid exponential. After you join, 10 of your friends must join within 3 days, and 50 within 3 months. Otherwise it will fail, just like others have failed. (I think the Diaspora guys get the adoption part. I don't know about their tech...) Your intuition is that you can incrementally develop a system and that it will be incrementally implemented and adopted. This intuition is wrong. The only way to succeed is to have a "big bang" release. There must be an adoption date chosen and a compelling message (like "quit FB day", but with a positive alternative). There has to be an easy to adopt dsn that is not too fragmented or confusing. Usability has to be excellent. There has to be virality built in. You must be encouraged to invite your friends and it is easy to do so. The default message to your friends must be compelling. You must be able to find your friends if they are already on. The user experience must be on par with what they are used to. The only way I see to achieve this is to pick 2-3 systems (maybe Elgg and a new one) and focus on making them interoperable and competitive with the proprietary ones. Adopting existing standards should be means to an end, not an end in itself. If adopting a standard makes for a better use experience or saves time, then good. Otherwise, it's a distraction from the adoption goal. Working with existing systems beyond 3 is definitely a distraction. If users are faced with 5+ choices and interoperability or user experience are not on par with proprietary systems, then adoption will fizzle. In order to have a compelling message, you have to provide a real alternative. This means that you have to provide real privacy and control. There has to be a future path for users to run their private instances and interoperate with the dsn ecosystem. There must be transport encryption. There have to be easy to use granular access controls. The social graph must be private. StatusNet, for example, is a great microblogging platform, but it's all out in the open with no privacy controls. Maybe it's possible to improve on it. So what I think is needed is: - Define the user experience - Define a protocol that enables this experience and that fulfills privacy goals - Work with 2-3 systems to implement the protocol and bring them up to par - Do a PR blitz with a target launch date Re #1 (previously emailed): http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/User:Miron2/Social_Use_Cases -- Miron Cuperman http://hyper.to/blog/link/category/the-new-web/reputations/ http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/User:Miron2
