So there’s a total shit storm developing about Facebook‘s new privacy situation. Long story short, FB has decided to implement a few new sharing features and enable these tools by default. That is, you have to opt out.
If you want a bit of background, you can check out this article from GigaOm.
For those of you who don’t like all those words, you can check out this graphic.
Just this morning there were reports that Yelp.com, one of the three sites that Facebook shares data with had a security breach that would have allowed a hacker to gain your information without you ever visiting the site.
What’s really frightening to me is that you have absolutely no control over your data. That is, there’s no way for you to ‘own’ your data. You enter data into Facebook, be it text, images, links, video, etc, and then it just disappears into your profile. I don’t mean that you can’t see the data, I mean you can’t control the data from a central point.
Take this site for example. I have complete control over all the data published here. I can log into my control panel and delete, change, modify, and hide any information. I can obscure some posts and information, I can control who can see certain posts through passwords.
The problem with Facebook is the same problem with any technology that is simplified to the point that anyone can use it. It becomes so dumbed down that unintended consequences start causing issues. Now, I’m not being a tech snob here, I’m just saying that when technology becomes so democratized, it’s very easy to end up with an entire userbase that simply doesn’t understand what the hell is going on with their data. The problem that Facebook faces is that it’s become the most popular site by being so accessible. So, Facebook won’t make any significant changes to increase data portability or security; the site might be less attractive to people with no technical ability.
So, what’s a solution? Obviously, if you read the title, Microformats and Open Source. Microformats, in a nutshell and taken from their site, are
a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general
Microformats are a way to structure data to make it more usable and searchable. Microformats are, to oversimplfy, tags that tell search engines what kind of data they are crawling. These tags take a simple bit of information, like Eric H. Doss, and defines what each part is. That is, it explains that the Eric H. Doss is a name, Eric is the first name, H. is the middle initial, and Doss is the last name. This is important, so make sure you understand this before you more forward.
Microformats can also be used to tag addresses, email addresses, URLs, picture albums, and instant messenger names. Expanding microformats to include certain social content would allow a larger implementation across platforms. In other words, if there was a simple way to organize social data, you could use any number of websites to share your content, but all the information would be open and portable. To say that you need to use Facebook or MySpace or Bebo to share social content is about the same as saying that your GM vehicle can only run on Exxon gasoline or saying that your Whirlpool washer can only use Purex. Actually, it’s more like saying that your Ford Taurus can’t run on the same road as a Chevy truck. It’s silly. If the social web is a highway system, users should be able to access the social web no matter what you drive. This is, with the exception of IE8 not processing CSS properly, the case with browsers. You can access most websites with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE.
Establishing a set of social microformats would allow you to publish updates, post photos, comment on other people’s statuses, etc without depending on Facebook or MySpace. To use microformats, you would need to have a website of your own. That doesn’t mean that you’d need your own domain: your site could be a blog, a Posterous site, or a text file. Once you have a site that allows microformats, it would be great to have a pretty simple interface for tagging data. Once you do that, the crux of the thing is to get your site found. Google makes that pretty easy for you. You can submit your site to Google using a sitemap file. Google accepts and indexes some microformats, including people, recipe, and review microformats.
Once you implement microformats on your site and your friends do the same, it’s just a matter of using a search engine to locate the data. Basically, to find me, you would do a search for pages where Eric H. Doss is tagged as the owner. The essential piece of this idea is how to aggregate this data and present it in a format that is useful to the average user. The real key to make this work would be a site that aggregated and stored the locations of your ‘friends.’ Basically, you would log into a site, list your friends, and then allow the site to aggregate and search for your friends. This would be really similar to the way I use Google Reader and RSS feeds to consume data. At any time, I can export my subscriptions from Google Reader and import them into another news reader. Your friend data would be the same, you could export and import at will.
The larger issue is that people are really starting to realize that closed and propriety systems are not good for users, not good for privacy, and not good for sharing. If large social networks implemented open standards, you could decide to leave Facebook and move to MySpace without any hassle, save exporting and importing a file with your data.
Thoughts?
