War of the social networks

After the long standing browser wars and the still continuing Operating Systems war , we are now at an epochal internet phase where the Social Networks are competing vigorously with each other.

From the Myspace days of celebrity social networks, to the now almost oblivious Orkut, social networking has had its course of metamorphosis. But, the credit of making Social networking a global phenomenon undoubtedly rests with The Social Network- Facebook. With all its flaws and contentions, Facebook boasts of a humungous user base, and stands third in the global population index, only after China and India!

When such is the reach of social networks, the crucial nuances pertaining to the fangs of the Internet like privacy, security and freedom for the users are little spoken about by the mass of the users, or are at least kept obscure to the users by the major players.

Privacy and Centralised Social Networks:

Prof.Eben Moglen calls monopoly networks, or the centralised social networks like Facebook, and the recent Google Plus, as large spying machines, and so, for valid reasons. Users have voluntarily surrendered intimate and delicate data to corporations like Facebook and Google, respectively. With the increase of the un-freedom in the internet, there are high chances of misuse of this data by the corporations either for profit or for information gathering, without the full consent or understanding of the users using their services.

Looking back at the initial days of the Internet, when conceived it was an autonomous conglomeration of end user machines present at the edge of the network. It was decentralized, free (as in freedom) and neutral (as in unbiased). But this fundamental trait of the Internet has eroded substantially, rendering the Internet vulnerable to severe censorship and manipulation by the big players of the Web.

Social Networks, give a comprehensive case study of all that the Internet was supposed to do, and is somewhere failing to do.

Diaspora : The Distributed and contextual social networking, mode of online socializing has been unleashed by the Free Software community. This will hopefully try to emancipate the Social Networking aspect of the Internet.

Knowing the perils of the devils:

1. Privacy: The privacy terms of be it Facebook or Google Plus are apart from being obscure, ultimately end up conveying the fact that the users' data will be not be given the discretion it deserves, on the contrary will be traded with third parties.
2. Security: The fiascoes of account crackings, floods of spams and unsafe content on these networks is certainly worth severe scrutiny.
3. Data ownership: Even when the users have deleted their account, there is no guarantee that the users' data is off the servers, and in many cases it still resides there.
4. Mandates: Users are at the mercy of the corporations for the features and applications which flock the users' profiles, with little or no role to the users in setting up the framework of their social network. Ex: The recent chat application updation in Facebook has created a lot of disgruntle amongst the users, but there is little that the users can do about it. 
   
    Google Plus and its privacy policy

5. Mad Ads: Personalized marketing of products and services using the personal data handed over by the users is a nuisance which has certainly annoyed lots of users.

An instance of a friend's personalized ad on FB!

Getting to know Diaspora:

Diaspora is the social network that puts you in control of your information. You decide what you’d like to share, and with whom. You retain full ownership of all your information, including friend lists, messages, photos, and profile details. Diaspora was kick started by four talented programmers from NYU Courant Institute, after having heard Professor Eben Moglen talk about “lack of privacy and free spying in the cloud”.

Diaspora doesn’t expose your information to advertisers, or to the games you play, or to other websites you visit. It’s inherently private.

Diaspora is not a single site — it’s a collection of different sites, with different URLs, run by different people. But they all run the same software, and they all talk to each other. Each server is called a “pod.” As the service grows, lots of these pods will join the Diaspora network.

The official pod, run by the project’s founders, is http://joindiaspora.com. Because Diaspora is a Free (as in freedom) Software, these 'Pods' can be installed and run even on a personal computer, and be made available to users on a small network for online socializing, like they would on any other centralized social networks. Also, as the source is available the users are free to tinker aroud with the features and share the modified updates!

Diaspora, by the virtue of being a Distributed Social Network, ensures privacy while still keeping the users connected and, not connectedness at the cost of privacy like in the major centralized social networks. With Diaspora, users will be reclaiming all their data, get connected on secure social connections, while sharing the data at their own terms.

Future of the Social Network Wars:

With the arrival of Google Plus, and the previous experience of failures with Google Buzz and Google Wave, Google seems to have hit the right chord this time around. Facebook-ers have been looking for an alternative and Google Plus might offer that respite.

Diaspora, although is the right antidote to the centralization of social networks, it might not well the replacement to the centralized mammoths like Facebook and the growing Google Plus. To envisage the future of Diaspora, I might concur with a Diaspora friend-Peter Rock-Lacroix, who on his blog writes the following:

“Putting aside social pull and the goal of market power, I think the success of Diaspora should be measured similarly to the goals of the GNU Project. While advocates of software like the GNU/Linux operating system enjoy hearing news of market success, they see the existence of free software itself as the most important success, rather than growing popularity. Maybe there will only ever be enough capital behind Diaspora to sustain a niche market or perhaps, it will come to the mass market. Regardless of that, even if a small network of users exist who can run their own privacy-aware, free personal web server, that’s a success too.”

In the next article, a feature wise comparison between these social networks, along with the steps to install a Diaspora Pod will be presented.

Raghavendra S

(raghuarr@joindiaspora.com)

References:

http://blog.diaspora.com/

http://gnuosphere.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/will-diaspora-succeed/

(My article published in the August 2011 edition of the FSMK newsletter
http://www.fsmk.org/newsletter9 )