[Social-discuss] Closed software is ahead of us

[Carlo von Loesch]

User "Hunger" made some nice clean-up work on
http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas
and added a link to http://lifesocial.org

I was quite impressed by the work LifeSocial
seems to already have implemented. It's pretty
much the kind of technology Ted and I have
been talking about: true encrypted peer-to-peer
social networking.

Well. So far the good news. Now the bad news.
I kept looking for the download button over and
over. Nothing. It's not open source. It has been
presented at this year's CeBit fair and received
various reviews in German press but it's undisclosed
as yet and intending to become a "start-up."

Okay, we all like making money, but we in the free
software world will have lost another battle if by
the time we have a Facebook lookalike solution the
people are already migrating away to the new "Skype"
of social networks: A proprietary exe that you load
to your PC in order to do distributed encrypted
social applications (and the plug-in interface looks
quite powerful) but you can never be sure it is
indeed working for you, not for somebody else, because
you don't have the source.

We the geeks will say, hey, you can't trust that, but
the average user will embrace the powerful next gen
of social networking and by the time people like Ted
and I get our apparently not so revolutionary ideas
into actual code, people will not care as much. They
already have LifeSocial (or something else if there are
more commercial players ready with this). Maybe they
will prefer a free software as much as they prefer Jabber
over MSNICQ, but the majority of friends will not be on it.

In other words, if we don't put something revolutionary
out there real quick, it may be too late. We'll be ready
with yet another php thing when Facebook et al are already
on the decline with early adopters moving on to the next
big thing.

My impression of the situation.

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