Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook - Polidicks

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html]Source[/url] [release][img]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about_CA0/12about_CA0-articleLarge-v2.jpg[/img] [i]Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20, far left; Dan Grippi, 21; Max Salzberg, 22; and Raphael Sofaer, 19, all students at N.Y.U., are trying to reinvent social networking online.[/i] How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it? A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support. It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans. “We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.” They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. “Maybe 2 or 3 percent of the money is from people we know,” said Max Salzberg, 22. Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 — “four talented young nerds,” Mr. Salzberg says — all of whom met at New York University’s Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.” The terms of the bargain people make with social networks — you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites — have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post. “When you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever,” Mr. Salzberg said. “The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy.” The Diaspora* group was inspired to begin their project after hearing a talk by Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, who described the centralized social networks as “spying for free,” Mr. Salzberg said. The four students met in a computer room at N.Y.U., and have spent nearly every waking minute there for months. They understand the appeal of social networks. “Certainly, as nerds, we have nowhere else to go,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re big nerds.” “My social life has definitely collapsed in favor of maintaining a decent GPA and doing this,” Mr. Sofaer said. A teacher and digital media researcher at N.Y.U., Finn Brunton, said that their project — which does not involve giant rounds of venture capital financing before anyone writes a line of code — reflected “a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.” And the demand for a social network that gives users control is strong, Mr. Brunton said. “Everyone I talk to about this says, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been waiting for someone to do something like that.’ ” There have been at least two other attempts at decentralized networks, Mr. Brunton said, but he thought the Diaspora* group had a firmer plan. Its quick success in raising money, he said, showed the discontent over the state of privacy on the social sites. “We will have to see how widely this will be adopted by the non-nerds,” Mr. Brunton said. “But I don’t know a single person in the geek demographic who is not freaked out” by large social networks and cyber warehouses of information. The Diaspora* crew has no doubts about the sprawling strengths and attractions of existing social networks, having gotten more than 2,000 followers of “joindiaspora” on Twitter in just a few weeks. “So many people think it needs to exist,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re making it because we want to use it.”[/release] Hmmm, [B]Diaspora*[/B]... sounds pretty cool, don't you think? I might look into that later on :P [i]*phone rings, a butler gets the call*[/i] - Excuse me, Mr. Zuckerberg? It's for you, sir... - Ok, put him through. [i]*a few seconds later*[/i] - [highlight]FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU--[/highlight]

Nobody cares about facebook and its killer app

It sounds cool but I don't see how it will be profitable. Facebook only started making a profit when it hit 300 million users last year, and that's because of the they that they advertise. Advertisers love being able to target specific people, it makes their job a lot easier and more likely to sell the product.

Nothing will become of this.

Hopefully they will make a social network which doesn't encourage attention whores and other idiots to join.

This sounds interesting.

facebook is pretty shit imo

[QUOTE=toxicpiano;21920744]It sounds cool but I don't see how it will be profitable. Facebook only started making a profit when it hit 300 million users last year, and that's because of the they that they advertise. Advertisers love being able to target specific people, it makes their job a lot easier and more likely to sell the product.[/QUOTE] But that's because they're centralised.

[QUOTE=veribigbos1;21920814]Hopefully they will make a social network which doesn't encourage attention whores and other idiots to join.[/QUOTE] Let the fp mods moderate it. No more attention whores and idiots.

[QUOTE=EFG;21920840]Let the fp mods moderate it. No more attention whores and idiots.[/QUOTE] Thats a brilliant idea

Only reason why I don't like Facebook is because you information is already available to the FBI and future employers; fact.

[QUOTE=toxicpiano;21920744]It sounds cool but I don't see how it will be profitable. Facebook only started making a profit when it hit 300 million users last year, and that's because of the they that they advertise. Advertisers love being able to target specific people, it makes their job a lot easier and more likely to sell the product.[/QUOTE] Considering they raised 10k in 12 days I'd say it's moving along better than most other attempts. Does this mean it will succeed? Maybe, but sitting here and spouting it as a failure before it's started seems a bit hasty, doesn't it?

[QUOTE=Tigster;21920895]Considering they raised 10k in 12 days I'd say it's moving along better than most other attempts. Does this mean it will succeed? Maybe, but sitting here and spouting it as a failure before it's started seems a bit hasty, doesn't it?[/QUOTE] I like the way this man thinks [B]toxicpiano[/B], don't be such a stick in the mud

Twitter is the best social networking site, yet no-one I know uses it. :smith:

[QUOTE=Shibbey;21920934]Twitter is the best social networking site, yet no-one I know uses it. :smith:[/QUOTE] [img]http://images.whatport80.com/images/9/9e/HA_HA_HA,_OH_WOW.jpg[/img]

[QUOTE=RJD2;21920956][img]http://images.whatport80.com/images/9/9e/HA_HA_HA,_OH_WOW.jpg[/img][/QUOTE] I LOL'd hard too. I needed it :v: BTW I second that! Twitter sucks

So they don't want people to give their info to facebook but to them instead.

[QUOTE=markg06;21921033]So they don't want people to give their info to facebook but to them instead.[/QUOTE] They offer you the alternative to handle all your personal info in a way Facebook doesn't.

Why would you need to give personal info to a social network in the first place? Facebook doesn't require it to work, Twitter doesn't require it to work, its the user's own fault if they give it to them.

[QUOTE=veribigbos1;21921096]Why would you need to give personal info to a social network in the first place?[/QUOTE] That's exactly the reason why I don't use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. However, if someone chooses to do so, IMO it's a pretty good idea they give you a lot more tools to handle your profile and everything you post on the web.

In your opinion guys, what other ways can you think of a social network being profitable? - You could charge membership fees, but that would only get maybe if lucky a couple million. What other ways?

I use FaceBook to keep up with people I knew from high school, but I avoided giving it too many details that companies would be able to exploit easily. Such as addresses and phone numbers. I don't really see what the fuss is about as much, companies will always end up targeting large sites for information, so this site would have to stay small and unused.

[QUOTE=wutanggrenad;21921232]In your opinion guys, what other ways can you think of a social network being profitable? - You could charge membership fees, but that would only get maybe if lucky a couple million. What other ways?[/QUOTE] Besides selling all that massive amount of info for Marketing analytics, I don't see another way to make it profitable... :/

Fucking Facebook.

Pff, when I had a facebook account (I disabled it recently) half of my info was fake.

[QUOTE=Pretiacruento;21921282]Besides selling all that massive amount of info for Marketing analytics, I don't see another way to make it profitable... :/[/QUOTE] Ads, just considering how many people have facebook and view it every day.

The question I want to know is does facebook give out names to all their information? or do they just say, 20 whatever male canada likes whatever or do they group it... there are 4430 20 whatever males in canada that like whatever

This sounds great but at the end of the day, the chances of Facebook users dwindling any time soon are pretty slim. In an ideal world this would basically steal all of Facebook's users, but nobody is going to bother their ass about switching over.

[QUOTE=wutanggrenad;21921392]The question I want to know is does facebook give out names to all their information? or do they just say, 20 whatever male canada likes whatever or do they group it... there are 4430 20 whatever males in canada that like whatever[/QUOTE] It goes down to city, street sometimes, if advertiser pays enough, hehe

Diaspora eh?Looks like them nerds know some greek.