LIFT 10 Notes on "Leapfrogging Facebook:Why we should and how we can?" Workshop

Lift10 took place in Geneva from May 5-7. The group of students that won free passes offered by the City of Geneva to participate in Lift are blogging their notes and insights from Lift10...

Notes by Daniel Neuberger on "Leapfrogging Facebook:Why we should and how we can? " Workshop.

People need a way to be connected, this is fact and it's good. The organizer of the workshop did not disagree but the current leading platform, Facebook, seems fundamentaly flawed in many ways. Facebook in it's core is a "closed" platform, meaning that it will aggregate information, but not distribute it again as freely. Above that, it's more often attacked now for their privacy rules. Tim Berners-Lee also demanded "open social networks must happen" and the goal of the workshop was to think about possible ways to achieve this.

Moving into to the cloud means friendly observation?

The central point is to create a win-win situation for all: give the users a reason to switch their social networks to a free one and give the companies a vested interest to actually build and compete with Facebook. The idea is to establish a network of trust, where you can manage your personal data in a personal container. You will own your data and be in control of the hoster of your data container, where choosing your hoster shall be as easy as choosing your mobile or internet provider at the moment.

This container interacts with the social network space in the sense that platforms can pull from and put data into your container. The underlying infrastructure and services should be open sourced and available to all from the definition to the implementation.

"A social platform requires trust."

So for this project open source means that the concept and development is based on an non-profit movement. But you'd also need an existing business model for the companies to adapt to the technology. The business model however still is quite fuzzy. One idea was to enable the hosters of the profile containers to be able to handle the management of personalized advertising. Other ideas went into the concept of Freemium services. This was discussed in detail by the "business model group".

Another group was exploring design and presentation ideas and a third was discussing technological challenges.

During the workshop (talk) phase our little group of three had an interesting discussion about how this concept could actually work, about the implications to the businesses and platforms accessing our data.

So what did I learn? I learned that it is important to have multiple social networking platforms to choose from. Although this does not guarantee privacy per se, it does give the user a valid alternative to leave his platform for.