Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how Blogger was a social network in the way FB is?

That's the idea here. If all your friends had blogs, they could easily create/ share content there the way they do on FB now. You could follow them in Google Reader, or any other RSS reader. Moreover, you could add content from news sites, most of which still offer RSS feeds.

But what if you want to share stuff only with friends, and not with the rest of the world?

True, that is not really covered in this scenario. Except Blogger gives you an option of whether or not to list your blog on search engines. I have a privat blog from before the FB era that is not listed, and does not show up on Google searches for my name. Although of course, I would not put any confidential information on there.

Well, of course it should allow my friends to search my blogs . Just not the rest of the world.

But I guess that if Blogger would be "open", so that other search engines could also index those blogs, then this whole scenario would not work (malignant search engines could expose everything to everybody). So my suspicion is that it would actually be quite hard (or at least require more research) to make an "open" version of facebook.

The original post misses the visibility point.

To me, Twitter benefits from being public discourse and an open forum for replies. On the other side of the coin, Facebook benefits from being a private forum (as most people use it).

Solutions that don't facilitate these use cases aren't going to be successful. Understand why people chose the services they did (discounting network effect) and then try and build something to compete.

And what if what you really wanted to share was a photo, or a comment, or an article from NYT or Vogue, and not a long piece of writing? Isn't that what most of Facebook is used for?

On Facebook, one at least has some protection against outsiders searching for their name and finding one's "silly" (careless) postings. If all posts were open, no such protection would exist. I think this could be a real barrier for widespread adoption of this approach.

a blog is a webbed personal log with comments and the core functionality fb offers is just that, a simple to set up homepage? Blogs have a blogroll instead of a friendlist, does that make a big difference? Seriously asking, I don't use the latter.

All it lacked was a built-in phpbb forum (FB groups)

Well the interface and way of sharing and communicating with people is totally different, so I am surprised to see them compared.

>the way of communicating with people is totally different

lol u srs? j/k <3

At one point, Blogger was as much a social network as Tumblr is now. At least, I think I remember that; it was about a decade ago now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com