8
0

Decentralizing Facebook and Google


 invite response                
2012 Jan 2, 9:48am   18,728 views  70 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

Both Facebook and Google have way too much power. They know who we know and can censor what we see.

Are there any viable decentralized ways to accomplish the same functionality as Facebook and Google?

Bittorrent is a good model, I think. Just keeps popping up and they can't squash it yet, though SOPA is definitely intended to.

Comments 1 - 40 of 70       Last »     Search these comments

1   TPB   2012 Jan 3, 10:36am  

Viacom will buy them eventually and that will be the end of that.
Though I really hope our Government wont be there to bail anyone out when they do jump the Shark. They will eventually, I have a sick sense about these things. It took a long time for MySpace to bite the dust, but I knew their day would come.
Let's not forget how big and mighty AOL once was.

Everyone is way behind the curve on this one. But people really don't like have their private lives and liberties trampled on. People will turn on the "Social Network" experience. Some one will create a simple web search engine with nothing on the page but a text box and a button on the bottom. With a service in the background that does nothing but index robot.xml and organically rank webpages by keywords and metadata.
And then people will say, "OH YEAH! This is what a search engine does..."

And Google will plunge faster than Novel from the tallest tree in a domain forest. As Google forgot why they've been synonymous with "Internet Search". They came along when pages like Lycros, and Yahoo, had a search text area hidden in a form riddled with the digital equivalent of measles lesions.

I've learned a lot from Google searches, but I came to the realization in the last few years. I couldn't learn a fraction of the things that I've learned on the internet since 1996 or so to now. If I had it all to do over again and only had Google to rely on as a resource.

"What will the Neighbors think?"
...and as for Facebook, just how much self inflicting social abuse can people possibly take? I think the result of Facebook will be a more reserved and conservative society that reverts back to consuming their every waking moment out in public. Self conscious, and worrying about, what other people will think about them.

But the good news is, when Facebook goes way so will the data. Eventually especially as only a few years would render it irrelevant. I remember back in '97-'99 there was a big concern that everything you posted on the internet would be there forever. I really wish that were the case, I did some pretty cool web designs and java-scripting on a Geo Cities web page back then. That would be hoot to see again. I could have really used those scripts in my library, a quite a few times.
Which brings me to further proof Facebook is just the flavor of the month. Geocities was the shit at one time.

2   marcus   2012 Jan 3, 12:46pm  

The GOP says

Viacom will buy them eventually and that will be the end of that.

You have to be be kidding.

The GOP says

Let's not forget how big and mighty AOL once was.

MY recollection is that no self respecting person who was already proficient with computers used AOL, ever. The only people who got AOL accounts were people who got their first computers and bought the AOL marketing. They wanted to check this new fangled internet thing and they didn't know any better.

No offense intended to any of those people who are reading this. But techical people had internet email accounts through universities, their tech firms, other corporations or through ISPs like most people do now. They had no use for AOL holding their hand.

Google isn't going away, unless they got too big and were broken up. Don't kid yourself.

You have heard of droid right ?( or Android - the operating system for most smart phones that aren't iphones )

3   nope   2012 Jan 3, 2:35pm  

Viacom is a $25 bn company. They couldn't come close to buying facebook, much less google.

If you don't trust a company, don't use their products.

4   SiO2   2012 Jan 3, 11:45pm  

The search provider has to make money, otherwise they go out of business. Google makes money by selling ads, so knowing about users is useful. I suppose a search engine could make money by selling subscriptions, and having T&C saying that they would not store personal data. But, then, they could not offer things like google docs. The other problem with this approach is that there's a large fixed cost to setting up the ability to do the search, so until they got many subscribers the cost per subscription would be very high. And would enough people be willing to pay?

Alternatively, one could use bing, ask.com, yahoo, or others. I imagine that they have similar business models to Google but don't have the same volume of data to work with at this time. Kind of what Kevin says, if you don't trust it, don't use it.

For Facebook it's different. The whole point of Facebook is sharing information, photos, etc. Those who post a lot obviously want that information to be accessible.

5   TPB   2012 Jan 4, 1:48am  

I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings.
The Viacom remark that was an Ironic joke. But not that far unimaginable, it was WAY out of left field when Time Warner, acquired AOL in the height of their game. The marriage was a match like if Hershey's Chocolate picked up Roto Rooter corporation. In spite of Marcus selective memory, "I didn't use AOL so nobody else must have either" AOL had more than 80% of the online access share from 95-2000, or about the time TW bought them.

Yeah I've heard of Android, I've also heard the data collecting stories of 2011. I don't expect that behavior to ease up in 2012.

Actually I expect a law suit that will make the DOJ vs Microsoft seem like a parking infraction. Not during THIS administration how ever.

6   MisdemeanorRebel   2012 Jan 4, 1:49am  

Yeah, police are finding Facebook to be the greatest tool ever.

They use it to check alibis, find dumbasses with pictures of themselves smoking weed, etc.

7   Patrick   2012 Jan 4, 9:47am  

The CIA also loves Facebook:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/

I'm starting to really hate Facebook.

8   marcus   2012 Jan 4, 10:11am  

marcus says

MY recollection is that no self respecting person who was already proficient with computers used AOL, ever. The only people who got AOL accounts were people who got their first computers and bought the AOL marketing.

The GOP says

In spite of Marcus selective memory, "I didn't use AOL so nobody else must have either" AOL had more than 80% of the online access share from 95-2000,

I don't see that these are inconsistent. I'm sure that maybe even more than 80% of people who bought their first computer in this era, bought a computer, not knowing how to use it, that is a computer that had AOL already installed and ready to go (or one step away from that -with install app on the desktop)

Sadly, Time Warner decision makers were probably not much more informed than this group. It's sort of like the congress people making decisions now about technology that they totally do not comprehend.

My point is that people in the know didn't expect AOL to do well.

9   marcus   2012 Jan 4, 10:34am  

Maybe you're a little right about selective memory, in the sense that in addition to being targeted to new computer users, AOL were first to have some features that were popular (chat and games). So no disresepect intended to people that liked aol for a while.

But I think a lot of people would have predicted that there would not be a long term reason to stay with aol.

Whereas with Google, the only question is how much more they grow, before things flatten out and stay huge (not that decline is impossible - but I don't see anyone predicting it other than you).

Facebook is a different story. Social networking is young and new, and I wouldn't try to predict where it will go. I can't imagine college age kids worrying about documenting their social life 20 years from now the way they do now. How it will be is way beyond me.

10   TPB   2012 Jan 4, 12:20pm  

AOL was on my first computer, I was not impressed, I thought THAT was the Internet. I dropped it after the first month.
I got a CD from Blockbuster they were hocking Sprint Net dial up ISP service. I thought that was refreshing all you do is click your dial up thing, then open your browser or email client, no bloatware to hold you hostage while it updated software then dismissed you, and discard your connection like a cheap date after a hummer..."GOOD BYE!"(DUNT!)

I hated AOL, but I loved my new found ISP, and I had a hell of time explaining to 90% of people how I connected to the internet with out AOL. I do remember that vividly.

11   TechGromit   2012 Jan 4, 10:09pm  

Mainly because there's not any money to be made from decentralizing. When you control the information, you can charge people to use that information. Weather it's a subscription based service to access the information or charging advertisers access to audiences, it's all the same. With the decentralized business model, who do you deal with? Since you can't control a decentralized business model, you can't make money off of it.

12   FunTime   2012 Jan 5, 7:35am  


I'm starting to really hate Facebook.

I'm probably way too influenced by the Fincher movie, but I get the idea Mark Zuckerberg has little regard for people who use Facebook and thinks they're stupid for allowing their privacy to be changed.

13   gardener1   2012 Jan 5, 6:02pm  

I'm not starting to hate Facebook, I've been hating it for quite some time. Kind of like Bank of America.

Every so often, with trepidation and fear, I have to go into my long dormant Facebook account to see what kind of mischief they've been into and check to be sure that all of my privacy settings and everything else are are set on "only me", as Facebook likes to change the rules of the game frequently and without notice.

Funny, I was once blandly sitting around one day after reading another infuriating article about Facebook privacy changes and googled "hate Facebook" "Facebook sucks" and similar othersuch phrases.

Much to my surprise all of these keywords led me to.....Facebook! That evil munchkin Zuckerberg owns all of the internet addresses hating Facebook and has incorporated them into his spy empire! Crap, you can't even hate the guy without putting your feet up on his footstool.

I'm just so happy that when I signed up for Facebook years ago I did it with a bogus email name and address and I have maybe 5 posts and no photos on my account.

Facebook sucks. Google that.

14   TPB   2012 Jan 6, 1:47am  

Every time i ever thought about signing up for a FB account.
The evening News would run a Story featuring some poor sap that had his right to privacy violated and trampled on, by his place of employment using something written or a picture posted to fire that person. Or let's not forget the hundreds of politicians that have managed to end their career over a FB post.

Just because it's posted on Facebook doesn't give your company the right to impose into your private life. Besides, it's the Internet, your supposed to use monikers and pseudonym as many people do. Under such avatars it's OK to break out of character and create an online persona for your self. You're a bore in real life, let's face it, if you had real friends you would be out doing things with them in the real world, instead of online painting yourself into a social taboo corner.

My other biggest problem besides the right to freedom of speech and expression on line, is the lack of rights of others not even on Facebook. What gives people the right to post pictures of you on their Facebook? Especially when that picture could be taken out of context and used against you.

15   thomas.wong1986   2012 Jan 6, 4:35am  

The GOP says

Which brings me to further proof Facebook is just the flavor of the month. Geocities was the shit at one time

Some people just have short memories...

16   Patrick   2012 Jan 8, 3:57am  

Yes, by entering search terms or friends, I told them private details.

But in return I got some useful service.

My question is whether we can cooperate to get that same useful service without giving any one company that info?

Something like the Wikipedia model maybe?

17   Patrick   2012 Jan 8, 11:03am  

Google is clearly useful in searching for stuff, though other search engines are almost as good.

Facebook got me the email addresses of some long-lost relatives.

18   TPB   2012 Jan 8, 11:33am  


Google is clearly useful in searching for stuff, though other search engines are almost as good.

Google has lost it as research tool of any use, beyond the usual suspect sites.

Wiki, YouTube, Movie database all other results beyond that are every online and brick and mortar with phish links to their sites. Even if you are searching for information on a 1972 Ford Pinto, the Google results assures me I can buy a brands spanking new one from Best Buy or Amazon. And any one of the myriad cloned affiliate sites.

19   marcus   2012 Jan 8, 10:45pm  

The GOP says

Google has lost it as research tool of any use, beyond the usual suspect sites.

http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html

If you haven't used it, you'll find it under the "more" dropdown menu

20   TPB   2012 Jan 8, 11:14pm  

Marcus if you don't know what I mean, then just say so.
Perhaps you never really used Google, you just took the first link in the list for granted all of these years.

21   marcus   2012 Jan 9, 9:22am  

I partly understand what you mean. But regarding your statement about research, I was just pointing out that there is the "scholar option" for people doing serious research using google.

I think searching could possibly be more effective, but a lot has to do with the people who make webpages. Isn't it their responsibility to put the keyowrd tags on the page and to do whatever they can to optimize their search ranking. I guess getting it linked from other places helps, and that there are other things people do to optimize the search rank. MAybe it's the commercialization of that process that bothers you.

MEanwhile, I know that google has their own algorithms for identifying articles and so on, given topics or search terms.

Here let's try, I'll do a google search on "housing, shadow inventory." A lot of articles came up. Not too bad.

I know that in the technical world newsgroups are going to be FAR better for discussing cutting edge technologies and so on, but those are user groups (discussion oriented). For what it's supposed to be, I am not that down on google .

What is your preferred method to find articles from periodicals on a given topic. Library search engines ?

22   marcus   2012 Jan 11, 11:05pm  

marcus says

What is your preferred method to find articles from periodicals on a given topic. Library search engines ?

I guess knowledge is power, and GOP doesn't want to share his methods, lest he lose his big edge.

23   Fabio Neves de Brito   2012 Jan 18, 12:30am  

Hi liv4ever

I am representing Gefuso here. Thank you to write one of our blog link!

In the beginning of this post, Patrick has mentioned the SOPA. So, I have another good link explaining what we think about it http://www.gefuso.com/annoucements/we-say-no-to-sopa/

We are fighting for the Internet Freedom and specially today our team is trying to write we can to bring more people into this fight! against SOPA.

Help the Internet and say no to SOPA!

Regards

Fabio de Brito

24   TPB   2012 Jan 19, 7:10am  

Shares of the search giant tanked 10% Thursday in after-hours trading, after Google reported quarterly profit and sales that rose from year-ago results but badly missed Wall Street's forecasts.

And...

THAT was THAT!

25   Patrick   2012 Jan 19, 7:51am  

Perhaps they've hit their ceiling.

I get the feeling Facebook is getting there too.

26   TPB   2012 Jan 19, 10:35am  

marcus says

marcus says

What is your preferred method to find articles from periodicals on a given topic. Library search engines ?

I guess knowledge is power, and GOP doesn't want to share his methods, lest he lose his big edge.

Ah crap I'm sorry Marcus, I didn't see your reply.

I type shit in the text bar and hit enter.
I'm not looking for insight from academia in the searches I'm speaking of. But more from user groups, and vanity pages where someone posts a wealth of knowledge about a topic they are passionate about.

It could very well be, that with Social Networks being the flavor of the month. Those style of page I was speaking about, don't exist anymore. People are do busy hooking a piezo magnetic pick up to their sphincter to send out Tweets every time they fart. Perhaps the coolness of just being able to do that in first place, trumps any desire to actually write a blog on how they actually managed to create their homemade rig.

Then perhaps, 15 years later, those folks early on, that found the internet an invaluable place to forever archive their knowledge for prosperity, have died knowing they left their legacy. Then Irony kicked, and nobody was left to pay the hosting bill, and their directory was whipped clean, and Ratemypoo.com was placed their instead.

Perhaps we've finally figured out to use the internet.
Welcome to Network Television 2.0.

27   Patrick   2018 Sep 27, 8:12am  

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access-to-your-shadow-co-1828476051

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.” I managed to place an ad in front of Alan Mislove by targeting his shadow profile. This means that the junk email address that you hand over for discounts or for shady online shopping is likely associated with your account and being used to target you with ads.
28   HeadSet   2018 Sep 27, 9:48am  

AOL had more than 80% of the online access share from 95-2000,

That did not have anything to do with "computer smarts", it had to do with what was available at the time. During that era, if a household wanted on-line access it had to be through a dial-up telephone modem. And that modem had to connect to a bank, hence the need for AOL. Once home high speed internet became available through DSL and Cable, AOL was no longer required and lost popularity.
29   Patrick   2018 Oct 3, 10:02pm  

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed something strange was happening to my Google Chrome web browser. Where Chrome had always allowed me to browse the internet as an anonymous user, suddenly my browser had signed itself into my Google account. A bit of investigation (and a visit to a nerd forum) pointed me to the cause: Chrome had logged itself in after I visited my Gmail account.

The change in Chrome’s behavior, it turns out, was not a bug. It’s part of a new technical “feature” in the browser called “identity consistency between browser and cookie jar.” Despite the gritty technical name of the feature, it represents a truly fundamental change in the way Chrome works. For the first 10 years of Chrome’s existence, Chrome was simply a typical web browser. You had the option to sign the browser into Google—and thus take advantage of Google’s many data-sharing and cloud-synchronization options—but you never had to. In the stroke of an update, the sign-in became mandatory: If you happened to visit a Google property, the browser would attach itself to your Google account.


https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/google-is-losing-users-trust.html
31   Patrick   2018 Oct 13, 5:19pm  

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says
America needs SKULLFUCKBOOK!, an app that works 24/7 to enroll synthetic personalities and pump them full of plausible, persona-specific transactions and searches at a rate of 100,000 new personalities per minute, until Facebook and Google ads are statistically worthless.


Hmmm, I like this idea. Would not be all that hard, and could be done to Google to, to devalue their ads.

There is already something a bit like it:

https://adnauseam.io/
34   FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut   2018 Oct 31, 3:49pm  

There is definitely a monopoly there, completely unregulated markets tend to lead to that, because you can just win by buying up competition and undercutting them to kill the rest off.
35   Tenpoundbass   2018 Oct 31, 3:58pm  

TPB says
Perhaps we've finally figured out to use the internet.

Welcome to Network Television 2.0.
36   MisdemeanorRebel   2018 Oct 31, 4:17pm  

Laura Loomer suspended until after the election.

Got up in Gillum's face too much. Asked him about DreamDefenders, a radical left wing student group he mentored and awarded as some Prog Youth Director a few years ago.
37   MisdemeanorRebel   2018 Oct 31, 4:17pm  

All Proud Boys suspended from Facebook. Gavin was suspended back in August.
38   Booger   2018 Dec 23, 7:07pm  

Youtube is now removing dislikes from socialist candidates.
39   HeadSet   2018 Dec 24, 7:44am  

When I piss it takes both their hands to assist me. ;-)

That difficult to find it?

Comments 1 - 40 of 70       Last »     Search these comments

Please register to comment:

api   best comments   contact   latest images   memes   one year ago   random   suggestions