Is it Too Late For an Open Source Challenge to Facebook?

About a year ago a friend encouraged me to sign up for FB. "Facebook?" I grumbled, "Isn't that the New AOL?" My pal persisted, saying it really was a good way to keep up with what the kids were doing.

So I signed up, found that indeed it was a good way to find long-lost pals from my misspent youth. But other than that it was pretty much a wasteland - stupid games and crap.

Zuck's privacy policies were troubling as well. So I tightened everything down as much as possible, contributed little, and monitored the "recent news" feed once every week or two.

What do I get from FB? Mostly simply the ability to find people; it's the closest thing to an internet phone book. You're better off searching FB for an odd acquaintance than you are Googling him.

But outside of that, email works fine for me. All I need is a "white pages" service. So I'd suggest that what the FOSS community should provide is exactly that, just a white pages registry. Put your real name and email address in and await queries from the registry: "Do you know John Doe? He's asked for your email address."

Such a registry would block mass requests, or only allow so many queries a month with more than a degree or two of separation from your existing acquaintances.

Someone here start that up, okay?

I think it's a lot like the Microsoft Office problem: for a long time it was hard to get data out, everyone you knew was using it, and significant mindshare and investment had been built on top of the original solution.

OpenOffice proved that it's possible to break free, but change may come at a glacial pace.

Competitors need a push-button way to get data out of Facebook, they need to match most features, and they need to be free. And, they either have to convince 30 of your friends to switch, or make sure that you can still interact with them perfectly if they choose to stay on Facebook.

I certainly hope it is not too late. At least I hope for an open, distributed system. "open source" is not the thing that is important here, Example: E-mail. Many E-mail clients and servers are not open source. But the protocol is open and well-documented which means open-source and closed-source can interoperate without any problems.

of course it's not too late. silly title. i agree with the conclusion though:

"It would be an outstanding thing to see an open platform challenge the Facebooks of the world. Without a doubt, smart purveyors of such a platform could leverage the openness, and potentially win users over with it. That idea already prompted our post "Why Does FOSS Development Lag the Innovation Curve?" The funny thing is, though, even though open source platforms and applications compete in so many other application categories, there is almost no real competition from the open source community in the social networking space. That needs to change."

Hmm, do we ever had any Open Source "answer" to anything succeed, not in the meaning of usefulness, but in the meaning of BEING ACTUALLY USED BY A HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, something that is necessary for, say, Facebook?

Compare:

@ Linux, BSD -> Windows, OS X @ ogg -> mp3 @ Theora -> H264, @ Gimp -> Photoshop, @ Open Office -> MS Office, @ Mono -> Windows .NET CLR, @ GNUStep -> Cocoa,

The only exceptions I can think of are Firefox/Webkit (still lagging behind IE, though).

In the server side, of course, it's different: Apache, Bind, MySQL, PHP, etc...