[liberationtech] Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been

[John Ohno]

FoaF has several issues that made it difficult for it to take off (and
clear, to many people including Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky, at the time
that it would fail).

Specifically:

1) FoaF is an extension to HTML, along the lines of the meta tag. Web
developers will remember the failure of the meta tag and its ultimate
abandonment in the late 90s. Only folks writing webpages by hand would
update this meta-information. A handful would game it for SEO purposes, and
the rest would ignore it or never know it existed in the first place. It's
in an even worse situation than the alt parameter in image tags, because
large organizations will demand those be filled in for accessibility
reasons. Relying upon individual web developers to adhere to any standard
when violating it won't break the page on their own browser has proven
foolish.

2) FoaF was strongly associated at the time with the semantic web -- i.e.,
with RDF. RDF has mostly died off, in part because during its height its
most popular formats were XML-based and nobody wants to write ontologies in
XML, but also because the semantic web dream was that individual web
developers would individually annotate their pages with predicates and that
the set of all predicates any given browser had trawled could be made into
a cohesive ontolology. Browser plugins for grabbing RDF predicates from web
pages & building a knowledge base never got made. RDF tooling exists in the
form of specialized suites for digital humanities and data mining, and
remnants exist in new standards like JSON-LD, but the best open source RDF
stuff is plugins for fringe declarative logic languages like prolog and
kanren. In other words: in the general web world, 'the semantic web' is
seen as a complete failure, & this took down basically all associated tech.

3) FoaF was only really accessible to people who ran their own sites. You'd
have to run your site in order to declare your association with somebody
else. It'd expire if your domain name expired or the page went 404. It's
not really amenable to a centralized service, but having it decentralized
means only folks who pay for their own domain names could really use it.

4) FoaF was public -- no access control at all. So, you couldn't declare a
relationship to another person to only a certain audience.

5) FoaF only specifies relationships, & has no mechanisms for actual
communication. It's a way of saying "as the owner of x.com I am married to
the owner of y.com". (This is not a problem for FoaF, which was intended as
a mechanism to make mining relationship graphs more reliable, but it's a
problem for the idea that FoaF is a competitor to or replacement for
facebook.)

I like a lot of FoaF-adjacent things. I think distributed ontologies are a
nifty idea, for instance, and in the halcyon days of 2007 the idea of
making sure your relationships could be turned into a machine-readable
graph seemed a lot more innocent and a lot less like giving stalkers and
predatory marketers free content. But FoaF is both limited and a bad idea
even by 2007 web-tech standards.

On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 4:58 PM Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> [image: Preview image]
> <https://links910.mixmaxusercontent.com/5e196044087550002eab97f3/l/U76cozjhxBQ1pvgTw?messageId=W9OHBT8vk2F6CFcSU&rn=gIUxkI&re=IyZy9mLoNWZ052bpRXYyVmYpxmLzR3cpxGQ0xmI&sc=false>
> Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been
> <https://links96.mixmaxusercontent.com/5e196044087550002eab97f3/l/kVFQrV1S74CU4jrv8?messageId=W9OHBT8vk2F6CFcSU&rn=gIUxkI&re=IyZy9mLoNWZ052bpRXYyVmYpxmLzR3cpxGQ0xmI&sc=false>
> Why didn't the FOAF standard give us distributed social networking in the
> 2000s?
> <https://links910.mixmaxusercontent.com/5e196044087550002eab97f3/l/bcX4d8j6sa3uLQXzL?messageId=W9OHBT8vk2F6CFcSU&rn=gIUxkI&re=IyZy9mLoNWZ052bpRXYyVmYpxmLzR3cpxGQ0xmI&sc=false>
> twobithistory.org
> <https://links94.mixmaxusercontent.com/5e196044087550002eab97f3/l/Hvpas6xUu0dU70TDZ?messageId=W9OHBT8vk2F6CFcSU&rn=gIUxkI&re=IyZy9mLoNWZ052bpRXYyVmYpxmLzR3cpxGQ0xmI&sc=false> [image:
> Mixmax]
> <https://mixmax.com/r/5e196044087550002eab97f3?ref=Website%20preview>
>
> FOAF’s failure to take off demonstrates that people have never valued
> control very highly. As one blogger has put it, “‘Users want to own their
> own data’ is an ideology, not a use case.”10 If users do not value control
> enough to stomach additional complexity, and if centralized systems are
> more simple than distributed ones—and if, further, centralized systems tend
> to be closed and thus the successful ones enjoy powerful network
> effects—then social networks are indeed natural monopolies.
> --
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