[Freedombox-discuss] legal problem w/ Twitter (et al.)

[Mike Warren]

Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> writes:

> My point is that it is not even a legal issue, but a strategic one:
> even if legally safe it is bad approach.

I don't know if I agree. I've always imagined a FB as mostly replacing
the "interface" provided by cloud services, not always the
"storage". I also don't think FB can hope to replace the "incumbent"
social-networking silos overnight.

For example, I use flickr. I certainly don't publish *all* my photos
there, but if I was using FB as my interface to the Internet I would
certainly want an option to do so (e.g. "broadcast to unfree
services" or something when publishing a photo).

Also, some services provide things which would be really hard to do
from a freedombox, like Twitter's ability to SMS to mobile phones. Or
(reliably) store the 90GiB of photos I have.

I also don't agree that "occasionally dropping in" to your "old"
services by hand is a good solution: it's simply too much pain. For
me, part of the point of the FB is to have ONE interface for your
network persona: I don't want to publish a photo three times.

Total two-way inter-operation may be hard or impractical (or even
legally problematic) for some services, but I think -- especially for
the popular ones -- that it should be available wherever
possible. Some of my friends and family don't -- and probably won't
ever -- care about a lot of these issues enough to not talk to (some
of) their friends (as much) anymore. This is what non-interop with
Facebook would mean for them, so looking at it from their perspective
I'd be trying to "sell" them on a box which would allow them to talk
to me, but cause it to be harder (or at least no easier) to talk to
all the friends they have on Facebook.

An analogy would be all the Windows and OS X interop software
available for free software: I suspect a lot fewer people would use
GNU/Linux and friends at all if there was (on purpose!) no NTFS
support, no SAMBA, openoffice didn't load Word, GRUB only booted free
OSes, Firefox only ran on free OSes, etcetera etcetera.

Even if *every* free-software advocate/user found FB to be awesome and
used it, you're still talking a not-very-huge percentage of Internet
users...

My thoughts,

-- 
mike warren
mike at mike-warren.com + http://www.mike-warren.com