[1]https://www.businessinsider.com.au/facebook-and-google-domin...
These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB.
Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and standard APIs for 3p apps - plus, perhaps, a web-of-trust or some other mechanism for validating identity. All rolled into standardized APIs backed by large competitors of FB (perhaps MS/Goog/etc?).
If the ISP monopolies can be broken, perhaps all that could be hosted on a little Android-like box connected to a home ISP - your little social box, connecting you to every human on earth... always online, it caches messages from friends when your phone looses signal, p2p shares videos from friends so you can watch high quality with no load time, and automatically curates content from connected feeds (perhaps with some on-board ML).
No ads, no big brother, for pennies a month.
I know Google's ad revenue is getting eaten by FB - perhaps they would profit from something like this. Cap FB at the knees by giving people FB's functionality without the corporate data-mining/lock-in, and reap ad revenue from the increased relevance of el Goog's search.
There are similar benefits to shops, manufacturers, services, bands, etc all too. Standard information/inventory protocols, and a review system connected to those individual personal identities, could undermine Yelp and even AMZN.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I think it's mostly a matter of execution. There is prior art covering all of the pieces, but no one has assembled all the pieces into a compelling product (think: iPod vs prior mp3 players, FB versus the myriad of ex-competitors)... hard but tractable with the right support.
Using email, the rule is that if someone sends you something, you own it; they could ask you to do delete it, but you can refuse. Facebook and other social networks let you edit and delete posts. Snapchat became big because you can send pictures that are automatically deleted after you view them.
Sure, you can reimplement basic message exchange in a decentralized way, but figuring out how to enforce the same rules in a decentralized system is nontrivial.
Good snaps get stored and shared forever, everyone knows to screenshot dumb posts on FB, and there are plenty of twitter archival tools. Youtube's DRM and takedowns work OK against film pirates, but it's still easy to find many movies and redistributed personal content online.
Though I'd be curious what fraction of those instances are someone speaking without thinking, or accidentally sharing to a broader audience... the former seems PEBKAC and the latter is a solvable UX issue.
Even on Hacker News, the various moderation features and things like being able to edit your post after publishing make a difference to how the community works. It's not only what you can get away with but also what people feel like they have a right to do.
An interesting proof of concept might be to try to create a forum like Hacker News, but using distributed software.
If you have protocols and software that lets someone run a social OS on their personal hardware and connected to the global network, then the walls have been broken. Any 3rd party can integrate or offer hosting.
You could also take the rabbit hole of battery improvements leading to running this on mobile devices or sending data through a distributed p2p network instead of personal HW. None of those are orthogonal to the proposal.
No it's not.
>For the first three months of this year, Alphabet reported just over $26 billion in revenue, up 21 percent from the same period last year. Without the EU fine, it would have notched $6.87 billion in operating income, up around 15 percent from the second quarter of 2016.
There are a multitude of problems, like privacy concerns and the fact that FB would have no incentive to keep the API very up to date or reliable, but I wonder if something like that could work.
Before the antitrust action Microsoft was knifing the baby and cutting off the air supply whenever anyone threatened their hegemony. Afterwards, a million little inroads were made that ended up making their monopoly irrelevant.
In fact the continued existence of Apple is a product of the antitrust action. Bill Gates struck the deal with Jobs in order to keep Apple alive as a "showcase competitor." If Gates didn't feel the need to keep up appearances he would have crushed Apple by ending the Office port.
I feel like the thing that really hurt Microsoft the most was the web, which made the OS far less relevant and has largely been their downfall. The failure of the mobile web seems to be largely why mobile OSs do matter.
Clearly, without the anti-trust ruling Microsoft was doing all it could to make the web proprietary, but the web wasn't pre-ordained to happen, and if it hadn't we might still be locked into Windows, regardless of what the anti-trust authorities did. Or maybe we'd be largely where we are today with the web having never happened and the focus shifting to mobile anyway.
And to look at Office, I feel like the real downfall of the network effects of Office was when PDF readers became ubiquitous and embedded in browsers, so that you could export a PDF from whatever editor you were using and send it to everyone and expect that they could read it.
Of course you can, you just need to have standardized protocols.
You and I can use any email provider we like, your client can use exchange to talk to it's server and mine can use a version of POP from the 80's and it /doesn't matter/ because the servers talk over a standardized protocol.
Facebook and Google used to support this. There was once a time when Facebook and Google Plus both had XMPP gateways for their real time chat traffic, which meant you could send a message from Google Plus to Facebook Messenger with no problems.
They shut it down because they both have a strong incentive to push vendor lock-in. They've been so successful that you've started to forget that life could ever be otherwise.
Take a look at projects like diaspora and mastodon. There's nothing stopping Facebook from reaching out to these projects and working with them to incorporate Facebook nodes into their network using the same protocol.
But it'll never happen, because Facebook needs the corral nice and enclosed before they can start tagging you and selling you off.
Social networks have been adding lots of features over the years to compete with each other. Realistically I think that fractured platforms would struggle to catch on because each provider would prioritize different features. Since social networking grows in utility superlinearly with the connectivity with your friends, features get less useful and the whole thing stagnates.
Basically: Microsoft Outlook is a social network of the kind you envision. Even Outlook for Mac versus Outlook for Windows is a sharp divide in terms of features! Do you think that people would use social networks if they looked like Outlook?
Additionally, the notion that the necessity of making group decisions on a protocol must lead to stagnation is not guaranteed. There's plenty of space for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter to form an an industry working group and make a protocol that meets their needs, and then throw it out and say "this is what we're using. Keep up or get left behind".
However, to more directly answer your concerns, there's nothing stopping Facebook from exposing basic functionality via an established and fairly firm protocol, and keeping advanced features as their competitive advantage. Textual Timeline posts, IM's and event RSVP's are good candidates for things to be exposed by the protocol. Facial tagging of images is a good example of something that a core social protocol could skip.
They need something on the other side of the "or" in "Uses Facebook or ..."
They do their best to buy anybody that sneaks in there.
I'm not convinced that is sufficient. Facebook at 80% isn't really any different than facebook at 99, or whatever. Google has a viable competitor in Bing, but google still dominates search to a massive degree.
As long as it's there, then if there's every a major ball drop on Facebook's part that makes a lot of people want to switch to something else they'll have somewhere to go. When people moved to Facebook from MySpace it was driven by a lot of issues with MySpace that pushed people away.
Something like this past year's election with all of the controversy over how the trending news was handled could have promoted a movement of "Enough, I'm done. Going to X." Enough "me too's" and you start a trend.
A lot of that happened with Instagram. People wanted a place they could go free of political rants and Instagram largely provided that...and Facebook owns them.
You've seen a lot of "quitting Facebook" trends this year and I believe that it's largely a result of lack of a viable alternative.
Unlikely and less efficient but that could be one way to handle it.
Facebook could continue operating as a partnership - that would be much harder to stop - but they might not want to given the liability implications.
Thoughts on anti-trust? If you're capturing every single part of the growth of a huge previously diversified market, whats the arguments against?