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ChrisB111
February 25th, 2010, 10:54 PM
I dislike the concept of facebook (and similar sites) as its a company trying to make money from me. I think a open source peer to peer social network should be developed, this would put users back in control. What does everyone think?

Chris

blueshiftoverwatch
February 25th, 2010, 11:00 PM
How would P2P social networking work? If my profile was on my computer and I wasn't logged on wouldn't that mean that nobody else could access my profile?

Unless there was some sort of system where random people's profiles were downloaded to multiple people's computers. So that if one person went to sign on there would most likely be at least one person from whom you could fetch the other person's profile. But that seems like it'd be very complicated and bug ridden. Also insecure, as unless some kind of encryption scheme was used. What would stop someone from embedding malicious JavaScript into another person's profile and having it load up on another person's computer?

OffHand
February 25th, 2010, 11:34 PM
Soulseek is a P2P network with chatrooms and you can search for people with similar interests. On Ubuntu you can use Nicotine+ (http://www.nicotine-plus.org) to connect to the Soulseek network.

red_Marvin
February 26th, 2010, 12:59 AM
I think this actually sounds like running your own server with a personal page. "A is friends with B" could be implemented by a link list. Groups could be done by setting up a web ring.

Jeff Anthony
February 26th, 2010, 01:26 AM
I've actually put quite a bit of thought into this a few years ago. I think with Ubuntu at this time the Drupal6 package would be very easy to install and configure for the average user creating one home personal website. Many modules are already created which give facebook style functionality and other's could be created offerign nice JavaScript interfaces home users could create pages, navigation and content.

It doesn't seem like that much of a problem that one's web page wouldn't be available when their computer is turned off but in the long run I decided the research wasn't worth it because if any part of it was implemented Facebook could easily offer the functionality as well using their 350 million users' already existing profiles and friend connections as the portal to their home sites.

No worries however, Mark Shuttleworth did mention they'll be focusing more on integrating Ubuntu with Social Networking at it's core.