Tag: history

I’ve decided to start writing a bit about various theories I have on social networks, Facebook, twitter, and the blogosphere. I fear that attempting to start an “Open Source” social network, or join an “Open Source” network is a cause doomed for failure. But, I’m not sure why. Back when I started blogging, I was amazed to find a network of real-world people brought together over blogging. The years haven’t been kind to blogging. Facebook and Twitter have slowly pulled users into their clutches.

My early days online were during the time of AOL disks and TV news hours advising against meeting people you talked to online. Meeting an open source contributor or two was as far as I dared advance. Certainly no online dating. I enjoyed reading BBS articles on graphics programming and tinkering with MS-DOS games and utilities. My access was limited and supervised as I was in middle school, and Linux wasn’t happening due to my PC being an old 286.

It took a few years, but I finally managed to scavenge a 486 from trash parts and with the help of NetZero (and a little sneaking around my parents), scored a net connection. Geocities gave me my first web home, and I started my first blog. I wrote posts in a text file and published by running ‘make install’. Staticgen before it was cool.

Key things I remember liking about ‘social networking’ in the days of Geocities and later MySpace:

• Webrings formed small networks of people with similar interests and cool information.
• Newsgroups provided amazing access to experts and connections with similar interests.
• E-Mail was used for more than verifying acconts.

Things I remember sucking:

• Connecting with real-world friends was generally e-mail only
• Newsgroups were full of self-styled experts and many weren’t kind to n00bs.
• Technical barriers were significantly higher than before.
• Slowwwwwwwww.

I recently took the effort of joining Mastodon. I don’t see it replacing Facebook or Twitter for anyone I know. I had hoped to maybe find a viable alternative to Voxer – not so much there either. Indeed, I don’t see much of use for me as an English speaker except maybe meeting some interesting folk around. But, mostly I’m seeing a bunch of young left wingers, and I don’t have much patience for the college crew today. Indeed, I’d venture a significant number of people I’ve interacted with weren’t even born when I first got to drive on the internet. Not much more to say, because someone else already wrote my experience with the problems clearly highlighted.

I don’t care for where Facebook is going these days – and I’d love to see the “next” big thing be something that fulfills some of the early promises of the internet. To me, that means choice of service provider and the ability to contact people from other providers.

I find the underlying technology interesting, and there’s a lot of awesome research potential and algorithmic stuff possible in this space. I thought I’d try to cover my exploration here on this blog. It’s as good a place for any for these brain dumps, and maybe some Zuckerburg character somewhere can use it to help build something. If you’re that person, cut me in after you make the money please.