wired.com — Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It's time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor's little gardens and put it back where it belongs -- free and open on the open web.
Aug 6, 2007 View in Crawl 4
wyzardAug 6, 2007
You can make photos public so the whole world can see them, but if you only want certain people to see them, those certain people must be Facebook members. You can't friend one of your non-Facebook-using family members and grant them access to stuff in a private album.Facebook is a "walled garden" because anyone who isn't a member is considered an anonymous, untrusted member of the general public. Opening it up would mean being able to friend people on other networks, for example.
wyzardAug 6, 2007
Nobody said anything about Facebook's business model being "nearly criminal". There's nothing wrong with them running their site the way they do.However, this is a free market, and people can and will switch away from Facebook if something better comes along. There's nothing wrong with that either; they have no obligation to keep using one service if they'd rather use another one instead. And an open, interoperable system, that doesn't lock people into a single website run by a single company, would probably fall in the "something better" category.
dpvuAug 6, 2007
No kidding... The world's population is just over 6.6 billion according to the latest figures (July 2007). So if 6 billion people have internet, you're telling me that only 600 million people on Earth don't have internet? WAY more than that don't have access to computers.
maz2331Aug 7, 2007
Just register a domain, host it someplace, install Wordpress and have your own website.
pepegsayAug 8, 2007
the death of walled gardens has been talked about forever. XML was one of the "bringers of death". Web services was another. We'll make strides I'm sure, but data is what makes the world go around, and it is in many regards irreducible. I wouldn't expect any great revolution.
pepegsayAug 8, 2007
Leave it to some assh**e to turn a feature into something to bitch about. Quit whining you emo retards.
idrylAug 20, 2007
Why would you want to list your information on some network that would leave you open to identity theft, stalking etc? Well, it's obvious that you wouldn't. But I DO want to be able to do that. The problem with facebook is that even if you WANT to put all your information on display for the world to see, there's absolutely no way to do it.Most people just assume that the option must be there to open up your profile - but have a look, there is NO SETTING on facebook which allows the world to see your profile - this is not the case with myspace, bebo, faceparty etc. etc.The only reason I can think that facebook would not allow users to fully open their profiles is to force people to join even if they aren't planning on using the service. It's totally evil and there's no excuse.However, at the same time as feeling this way I am glad that facebook offers a lot of privacy - if they didn't then I know for sure a lot of the paranoid people in the world (the vast majority, it seems) would use pseudonyms and would never reveal their full name - if that were the case then I would not have been able to track down old friends from primary school.The privacy is a mixed blessing but facebook has no reason for forcing all users to hide all their information other than corporate greed.
on9starOct 15, 2007
Whoever wrote this article should be slapped in the face[with a]book
zelixyOct 15, 2007
too bad they didn't include the Green Social network Zelixy