Posted via email from timelady’s posterous

These words may seem like big words to some people. Hey, to me they are even large ones. So, I’ll very quickly explain both of them.

• Federation

There are many definitions of this. The best one, IMHO, comes from dictionary.com – “a federated body formed by a number of nations, states, societies, unions, etc., each retaining control of its own internal affairs.” So, in terms of software (which is what i’m going to talk about today) means a bunch of programs (desktop or web etc) that all work together but can still be different internally.

• Segregation

This one is more obvious. “The policy or practice of separating people of different races, classes, or ethnic groups, as in schools, housing, and public or commercial facilities, especially as a form of discrimination”. So, again in terms of software, this is when different programs that are similar are split up and don’t work together, and sometimes don’t even know that the others exist.

Well, why am I talking about these? Well, I’m thinking about things in terms of social networking services just now. Facebook is huge. Noone knows exactly, but its probably between 350 and 500 million people. Lets be honest, the biggest social network in the history of the internet. However, they are having a huge backlash just now on their privacy settings, and a number of people are leaving it. Now, obviously a few people leaving it won’t change it much, but what happens when those people leave facebook? What do they do? Where do they go?

This is the horrible situation we have just now. Web apps are mostly segregated. They don’t work together, infact sometimes they work AGAINST each other, actively seperating themselves. Facebook is facebook, twitter is twitter, etc etc.

Well, this is where federation comes in. Let us take status.net into consideration. You can have any status.net instance (identica, or your own instance) and follow anyone on any other Ostatus federated web service. So, say twitter because Ostatus federated. this would mean that I could have 1 identi.ca account and follow anyone on identi.ca, twitter, twitarmy or any other status.net instance. And then, say facebook used Ostatus on their news feed? That would mean that I could have an identi.ca account (or twitter, facebook, or status.net account) and follow anyone on identica, twitter, facebook, or any other status.net instance. That is practically everyone on the internet, isn’t it.

So, the point of what I’m saying is that you could federate any part of a social network. This would mean that a new service (like diaspre) or an old service (like facebook or twitter) could implement these features as well, and then anyone could have 1 account on any of these services, and follow/be friends with anyone on any of these services. No more having 3/4 accounts on different services. Makes everything so much simpler and more open, and stops 1 service having a huge monopoly like facebook does just now.

So, yeah, federation, not segregation…

Semester GPA 3.4 #
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Guys please, get rid of your facebook http://calacanis.com/2010/05/12/the-big-game-zuckerberg-and-overplaying-... #
The Humble Indie Bundle has reached $1,000,000 in contributions! Starting to release the source. http://j.mp/9WtdAm [...]

Maybe you’ve already knew about the hilarious case of the ReadWriteWeb article “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“. By a stroke of luck this article became the #1 result for ‘facebook login’ on Google. Immediately after this had happened thousands of Facebook users started to flood the blog, thinking that this was their Facebook login page. They didn’t look at the banner, they didn’t read the post, and the later visitors didn’t read the notification that was put on the website to warn visitors that the blog wasn’t Facebook, they just wanted to login.

When they found the first thing with the words ‘login’ and ‘Facebook’ in it they pressed it and ended up in the comment section. There are now hundreds of comments of angry and frustrated users demanding the old Facebook back with the use of Caps Lock and ugly language.

This generated a lot of attention from others blogs and even the Süddeutschen Zeitung wrote an article about it. The initial reaction of many people — including mine — was one of disdain; how could those idiots be so stupid that they would confuse a completely different site — ReadWriteWeb is red, and has got a very busy page layout — for the Facebook login page.

However, when I read the blog post of a ReadWriteWeb editor on the issue, and especially the last section ‘Reminder: If you are Reading this, You Live in a Bubble’:

[...]

Given that all of these people logged into Facebook, I managed to check out quite a few of their profiles. These are normal people – often with a basic college education – they could be your neighbors. But for them, the Internet is magic and while might consider Facebook as little more than training wheels for the Internet, for these people it’s just magic – and Facebook is the David Copperfield of the Internet that connects them to their old high-school friends and Petville.

This is something we should take into account when developing an operating system for ‘human beings’. Not all users know what a web browser is and not all people care to know. We cannot change that, instead we have to make Ubuntu easy to use, not only for novices willing to learn, but also for those that don’t want to learn, or cannot learn.

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