[liberationtech] Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%

[David Johnson]

  <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel>

  Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%

   - By Sean Captain
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/author/sean_captain/> [image:
   Email Author] <sean at seancaptain.com> <sean at seancaptain.com>



http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/occupy-facebook/all/1

I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our
own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a
team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global
protest.

They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall
Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online
business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic
web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying
meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters
around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so
feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet
service<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/egypt-isp-shutdown/>.
A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall
Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter
hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and
even international movement.

Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks
and build their own, according to Knutson.
...

-- 

David V. Johnson
Web Editor
Boston Review
Website: http://www.bostonreview.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/BostonReview
Tumblr: http://bostonreview.tumblr.com

Mailing Address:
San Francisco Writers' Grotto
490 2nd Street, 2nd Fl.
San Francisco, CA 94107

Cell: (917)903-3706
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20111228/7ff6e4d7/attachment.html>