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Four Facebook Alternative Alternatives

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There are no Facebook alernatives. My friends and family are on Facebook. They are not on ANYTHING else. Until that changes, which I suspect it won't, nothing else will be viable.

For now, yes. But the history of the Internet is one of distributed solutions winning out over proprietary walled gardens.

For instance, a lot of people are on niche or community-driven social networking sites, alongside facebook. If those sites could communicate with each other, facebook would lose a lot of mind share.

You're right. But it's not happening now. I don't see it. Who are the alternatives everybody is flocking to? They don't exist.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hopeful for a new world of open protocols and you controlling your own data, but I just don't see it happening right now.

True, but we're still in the construction phase, which I of course find very exciting, but I realize it can be frustrating for people who might want a viable facebook alternative right now.

I do think it's an inevitability, and it's really just a matter of how soon it happens. Mark my words though, within at least 5-10 years from now, Facebook will look more like the AOL of social networking.

For reference, here is a screenshot of my Appleseed newsfeed:

http://goo.gl/RjD3f

Although I am cheering for every Facebook alternative, the UI in your screenshot needs work.

What do you suggest? Often people take issue with the color scheme, which is understandable, a default theme for an open source project needs to find a reasonable balance between good enough to use and ugly enough that people want to change it. It's important that people have the desire to "brand" their node, so as to avoid confusion.

Appleseed is fully themable using CSS, and keeps a clear separation between logic and presentation, so any designer can make it look any way they'd like.

However, if you're speaking more to the actual user interface, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on what you find to be an issue.

The screen-shot looks OK to me but I'm not a professional designer - the only thing that occurs to me is that div-sizes might be slightly awkward or the type might be a bit small.

One problem with any Facebook alternative where you have just one "reference application" implemented is that people will glance at the page and judge it by looks regardless of how configurable it is. That's a problem with any UI sadly enough.

I guess that's why I like the idea of creating layers and protocols to allow easy, multiple implementations. IE, my idea of five minutes ago - plugins for Drupal, Wordpress and Phpbb to ties multiple sites into a single large social network. The issue of design might then not be front-and-center.

Actually, Appleseed's framework abstracts out the user-facing code into a "foundation", which can be removed and replaced (and even inherited) without changing any of the underlying server-side logic.

So there's no reason I couldn't implement a radically different UI like this without changing any of the base code. Theoretically, you would even be able to switch between the UI's with a simple button.

http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Facebook-Facelift-Home-Profil...

How does the foundation talk to the server?

Do you have to use php?

If you wanted to build a new foundation, you'd do it in client-side JavaScript. You communicate with the server through a REST API.

Have a link describing the REST API?

Not yet, actually, it's still in flux, and documentation is sparse to non-existant. The next few releases will be ironing out a lot of the implementation, and I'm going to prioritize a guide for how to get started with it.

Yes, I'm happy to provide my feedback. I am not a designer, so I cannot articulate on every detail that needs improvement. I was just pointing out that it took longer than normal to grasp the functionality of everything. The most obvious improvement is removing one of the two search boxes. Even though you mention that designers can improve it themselves, the default design and color scheme should be very strong if you want to scale beyond early adopters that are passionate about your product. So the Christmas color theme should be changed. Reading text in a red font strains the human eye, so I'd do away with that as well.

I used MS Paint to make a few edits: http://yfrog.com/eodesign0j

The startup I am at has gone through 16 completely redesigned home pages over the course of a year before landing on the one we're at now. We are always asking ourselves what could be improved and watching User Fly videos to see where users are getting confused. I'm only trying to provide food for thought to improve and enhance your product; a product that is off to a great start.

Can you please tell us about any Facebook's alternative UI that does not "need work"? That something "needs work" is one of the most obvious comments that somebody could think of. Everything needs work. It would be more constructive if you could provide us with some points that the appearance of that network could be somehow better.

See my response above.

The approach of OneSocialWeb seems to be to define and extend existing standard protocols. This general direction seems appealing to me but in anycase, it's one extreme of possible approaches.

With Elgg or Insoshi, a "social networking engine" isn't particularly different from a generic CMS. In this sense, Drupal might be the leading alternative to Facebook, since it's dominant in its field (you could argue for wordpress too). And maybe that's an idea. An alternative to Facebook is to add a protocol to several common CMSes that would let you aggregate you friend's posts - Tie-together all the world's BBSes into a bullwork against Facebook. Anyway, a pure CMS where you sort the protocol later is the other extreme of approaches.

Appleseed and Diaspora seem somewhat in the middle of these approaches. They sort-of have protocols but don't seem to be protocol driven.

Appleseed is built to be protocol agnostic. It abstracts out the protocol to a series of event triggers/hooks. It can even juggle multiple protocols at the same time.

This was a deliberate decision, because we're still waiting to see which protocol will win out, so once that happens, by design, it's much more trivial to move Appleseed over to that protocol in a seamless way than other similar projects.

Which protocols are you testing? Which do you like?

Internally, it uses a custom protocol, which allows me to tweak it easily for my needs. The one I'm keeping my eye on is OStatus, and that's definitely the biggest possibility for what I'd switch to.

Although I like XMPP in theory, the requirement of running an XMPP server conflicts with Appleseed's requirement of being able to run on a vanilla shared host with no root access.

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