Beyond Diaspora: Another Facebook alternative has a head start

I just wrote a piece for Google Blogoscoped about Facebook and the problems with it, Diaspora and the obstacles it's created itself, and another effort that probably deserves some more attention. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Here are a couple of teasers. On Facebook's battle for complete control over our online lives:

In the mind of Facebook, locking in users by holding their data captive is equally legitimate to actually making them want to stay, and it means more power for them. The problem is very simple. They own every piece of information about you that either you or your friends knowingly or unknowingly submit to them. They control who can see every bit of it, and they control how you can access it. You can bet when you delete something, it isn’t actually gone, that when you set something to private, there’s nothing to keep it that way, that when you want to see anything on Facebook, you’ll have to do it the way Facebook wants.

...and this on a promising alternative:

There are many such projects, but thus far Diaspora seems to be the only one to garner widespread attention. The developers were able to achieve instant popularity and raise twenty times their initial goal of $10K because to most people, Diaspora is the only project working towards this goal. It’s main asset right now seems to be mindshare, but it’s uncertain how much promise it holds beyond that. With the recent release of their pre-alpha source code, it immediately became apparent just how many security holes and problems are blocking the project. It will take a lot of work to fix and will almost certainly be impossible to make their public release as planned. Still, that isn’t to say the project isn’t worth supporting. It absolutely is, but it is not the only one you should know about.

What if there was another effort underway to create a federated social network, but based on a project that has already successfully been incorporated into the business of a Fortune 500 company, implemented in multiple public instances with tens of thousands of users, received funding which totals at a cool $2.3 million, and most importantly, already works with federation?

Know of a cool app that deserves more attention? Nominate it for the next Ubuntu post-install guide!

A year ago i saw a lack of easy to understand yet comprehensive getting started guides for new users, so i decided to make one. I spent hours reviewing software, taking screenshots, and other exciting stuff in order to make a post-install guide which helps new users get used to and understand Ubuntu, and also recommend all sorts of apps that may be of interest to users of any level of experience. Please subscribe if you want to catch my next one!

My guides for Karmic and Lucid have gotten way more attention than i could've anticipated, and while some people have shown great appreciation with donations (thanks for the support!), nothing makes me happier than the hundreds of comments and even private thank yous about hear how these guides have helped them spread free software, or open source as you may have it, to their friends and family. Here are some of my favorites:

"Danny, you're a marvel. I'm going to try out some of those suggested apps this weekend and have some fun. I read this article just in time to share it with a friend who's trying out ubuntu on his new laptop. Thanks!"

- Anonymous

"Thanks for posting this guide! I've been thinking of getting my parents off Windows for a while and this is the ammunition that I needed. Thanks!"

- Carlos Rodriguez

"Awesome post, I installed most of them. I converted an old Dell Inspiron 8600 to a Ubuntu box because my Mother-in-law has a old PC from her job with Ubuntu on it. I have to be able to support her and it's been years since I lived in linux\unix since my Unigraphics & CATIA days in Automotive. This story rocks, thanks for sharing."

- Carl Brooks

"Really brilliant well done :)

So many apps and methods that I had no clue about and I've been using Linux for 6 years!"

- Mike

"Wow. This is what a release post should look like."

- Anonymous

"So as pretty much everyone else said, this writing is quite excellent and entertaining! I've bookmarked this as you've pretty much reviewed every other application I've never heard about before"

- sergiusens

"Awesome. Been using ubuntu since the start, and you introduced me to a heck of a lot of new things. Rock On!"

- Anonymous

Now it seems only appropriate to let all of you to nominate your favorite apps to be featured in the next iteration of my Ubuntu post-install guides. Just post a comment with as much information about the app(s) as possible: name, link, description, your opinion, etc. and i'll check it out! 

I'm back!

Sorry for leaving you all hanging for so long! Between working at the FSF and making friends with awesome people in free software, i hadn't made much time for writing. If you haven't already seen it, please check out the relaunched LibrePlanet project. LibrePlanet is an effort to establish local teams around the world promoting free software. If you're in Massachusetts, join us!

Now, i will be helping out with OpenHatch, applying to schools, and finding some ways to generate an income (suggestions welcome). I started a site for my sinister business: http://libreops.com/. I'm also taking two insanely overpriced courses at Harvard University's Extension School: Intensive Introduction to Computer Science, and Building Dynamic Websites. A new version of Ubuntu is coming out soon, so i'll be working on my next even more kickass post-install guide, with more delicious free software~ yum.

I spent all my the money i earned last summer on my first laptop (which wasn't borrowed or lent to me), a Thinkpad x201 Tablet with multi-touch. I'm hoping this could enable me to do some design stuff later on, and if you have any suggestions on awesome apps for touch-screens, do post a comment!

Here are some links to satisfy you (you may have seen these if you're in the related Reddit communities, or are subscribed to me on identi.ca):

• Free software needs free tools
• Great analogy: Free software will make Facebook the next AOL
• The four freedoms of free culture
• In defense of free knowledge: "I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion."
• The Debian FreedomBox project
• The talk which inspired it: We can use technology to fix politics, or we can wait forever for politics to fix technology. On freedom, privacy, and net neutrality
• Life is not read-only

My first day at the FSF!

I'm writing to you now from the Free Software Foundation headquarters! Today is my first day on the job as a campaigns intern. I've had my first experience with Trisquel (a purely free OS), played around with GNU Emacs, and made a quick blog post about the new anti-DRM sticker from Defective By Design. I even have a sweet little bio page:

Danny is an FSF campaigns intern and free software advocate from Newton, Massachusetts.

During high school he worked to raise interest in free software and successfully made GNU/Linux and other software like OpenOffice.org available on public computers as well as gained the support of a number of educators.

He has compiled a comprehensive free software activism guide available on LibrePlanet to help individuals and teams work effectively to spread free software.

For years Danny has worked with the Ubuntu community to make it more freedom friendly and bring more people to free software, gaining lots of experience in community organizing. Now he's working to establish a state LibrePlanet team for Massachusetts and encourage the formation of more local groups.

He is also an outspoken free culture supporter, as an extension of the free software movement, and is generally interested in issues concerning the control and distribution of information.

Today was mostly about getting settled in, but tomorrow, we'll have have a campaigns team meeting and Steve DuBois, the other intern, should be in the office as well. Two projects of mine i'll be able to work on while i'm here is getting the LibrePlanet Massachusetts Team fired up (please join!) and making FSF members eligible to join a credit union.

I'll keep you posted! 

10 Killer Improvements YouTube Needs

YouTube's recent new look has brought on some great usability improvements, and their adoption of VP8/WebM video codec/format released by Google is even better. Still, there is much more to be done to increase YouTube's openness, foster a respectable community, more fairly promote quality content, fill the remaining gaps of missing features, and further improve and clean up the interface.

1. Do not be like MySpace

• Nobody misses that atrocious monstrosity. Firstly, do not push this "new" bulletins feature back out. Spamming is not a feature. 
• Secondly, stop covering the homepage with advertising, especially all the deceptive sponsored content with fake video players, "close" buttons, and other misleading imagery. If more ads are needed, the partner program shouldn't be so exclusive (mentioned below). Take a look at this screenshot of a common occurrence, labeled with YouTube's #1 most popular comment, which leads us to the next idea. 
2. Fix commenting
• Promote better comments through a cleaner user interface. YouTube has improved slowly since being acquired, but still isn't what would be expected from Google. Site designs that waste space and don't make efficient use of screen real estate encourage short mindless posts. 
• Repeated comments could be filtered based on their length and uniqueness in the same vein as ROBOT9000. Short and common posts like "GAY" could be prevented entirely or at least made very inconvenient by requiring a captcha and displaying a prominent warning. Perhaps a minimum comment length should be adopted, at least temporarily. 
• Posting URLs should be allowed, but requiring a captcha would prevent spam. 
3. Specify copyright
• Allow publishers to specify their level of copyright with licenses like Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA), GNU FDL, Kopimi, Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which is a "stronger" Public Domain dedication that functions even in countries without a public domain, etc. 
• Allow us to search for such videos by what we want to be able to do with them: share, remix, and/or use for commercial purposes
• Provide a directory of music for publishers to use in their videos, perhaps partnering with Jamendo
4. Sensible accounts, contacts, and messaging
• Now that YouTube uses Google Accounts, there is no excuse to separate channels and users. The current system is like if Blogger limited a each account to one blog. One should be able to have multiple channels and channels should support multiple admins. Another Google Account shouldn't be needed to create another channel for a different purpose.
• It is entirely redundant to import contacts from GMail instead of simply using Google Contacts to begin with. 
• At the very least, YouTube's messaging interface needs to be fixed and cleaned up. It might even be better off eliminated. Neither Blogger or Picasa Web Albums have a special messaging interface, and YouTube's inbox seems to mainly collect spam. Instead, a contact form could be used much like on Google Profiles. 
5. Automate featured videos
• Replace the hand-picked "featured videos" system with something automated. Featured videos are unfair, impractical, and against the Google way. You can do much better to promote quality content from lesser-known YouTubers with algorithms.
6. Expand monetization
• Let viewers easily donate to producers they like on YouTube using Google Checkout without forcing them to pay to download or rent the video. This will be especially useful for free culture works or anyone using the pay-what-you-want model.
• Most people who apply to for the YouTube Partner Program get an email which opens with this: "Thank you for your interest in the YouTube Partner Program. Our goal is to extend invitations to as many partners as we can. Unfortunately we are unable to accept your application at this time. The current level of viewership of your account has not met our threshold for acceptance." If YouTube really wanted to extend this program to as many partners as possible, why is there even a viewership threshold? Anybody eligible for an AdSense account should be able to make money off of ads displayed with their videos. It's mutually beneficial. 
7. Live streaming

• YouTube has done a few live video streams for the past couple years but it hasn't been a standard feature available to anyone. It looks like that might finally change as an image on the Moderator help page shows a "Live Stream" button at the end of the bar (not the circled button towards the middle). When this feature become available, it would be cool to be able to broadcast to YouTube live from Jabber (Google Talk) with a video call. 
8. Downloads and video blogging
• If a publisher wants to allow free video downloads, this should be allowed. For videos where downloading is allowed, they should be available to download in WebM but also whatever the original file was. 
• Viewers should be able to subscribe to channels using RSS and Atom feeds like blogger. These should be easily accessed instead of requiring any special knowledge of how to find them.
• Video files should be linked to directly as enclosures in channel feeds to enable proper video blogging. I understand YouTube may begin allowing audio uploads, so this would be an absolute must for podcasts, but it should be added now for videos to enable videocasts that can be listed on Miro for example.
• If Blogger's reading list could by moved to Google Reader or some independent social subscription management site, then YouTube subscriptions might be better moved there so that people could follow channels using Google Friend Connect. 
9. Publishing options
• A video should not be published upon upload. The uploader should be given the chance to add captions, change video settings, allow encoding to finish in HD, wait for monetization approval, set a future publish date, etc, before having it pushed to their subscribers. Publishers are currently forced to set a video to private and change it to public once all the changes are made which pushes based on upload time, resulting in videos being buried in users' subscriptions.
• Lift the ten minute limit which forced longer videos to be broken into segments. 
10. Edit: Make HTML5 with VP8/WebM default
• A number of you have pointed out that basic counting skills reveal that there were only 9 ideas here, so i'm adding a tenth. YouTube should work on making sure that all of the features used in their flash interface (ads, annotations, etc), are also supported by their HTML5 interface. 
• The HTML5 interface should then be defaulted to with Google's free and open video codec and format, VP8 and WebM, respectively. The proliferation of a free video standard for the web is damn exciting, and this will help make VP8 and Ogg Theora dominate video and audio offline as well.

Edit: Add your support here

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=3177f94981a8ec05

Is Ubuntu committed to free software?

Of course we are! At least according to our philosophy.

Still, many people don't think that Ubuntu is truly committed to free software in practice. I raised an interesting debate which took place on the Anarchism Reddit about whether it is better to be a purist or not. It started out by talking about Facebook and moved on to Ubuntu. The purist side made a very good argument with this:

If Ubuntu made a point of saying how non-free software was bad, and offered ways to easily purge all non-free software from one's system, that would be different. But they don't.

This sentiment seems very reasonable to me, and people who feel this way can and should be our allies. The concerns are valid and not difficult to appease, so to act in accordance with our philosophy, we should make a couple simple changes to Ubuntu:

1. Offer a way to easily purge all non-free software from one's system. 
• This would require supporting the Linux-libre kernel (it doesn't have to be default, but the option should be available)
2. Make a point of saying why and how non-free software was bad, but also why the option is given to install it
• This would need to be shown every time Ubuntu recommends proprietary software like restricted drivers

Simple as that! I'm sending an email to the devel-dicuss list now.

For those interested in the "to be or not to be a purist" debate, the crux of the argument for me, as someone who does support Ubuntu, is here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/c7vfw/to_be_or_not_to_be_a_purist/c0qunme

Why Ubuntu LoCo's should move to LibrePlanet

In the debate over whether it is worth supporting projects like Ubuntu which are not purely free software, my opinion thus far remains that Ubuntu does help further the free software movement. Arguments against this are welcome, but that is a discussion for a future post. The reason that Ubuntu's local community teams should move to LibrePlanet is because having one of the worlds strongest FLOSS advocacy networks centered around one piece of software and sponsored by one company is a disservice to the greater free software community.

I have been heavily involved in Ubuntu advocacy for years, but for a while now, i've been considering the prospect of local teams operating independent of Canonical. This would not be a move to abandon Ubuntu, but simply to open up more possibilities and reach our full potential. Most people in LoCos are not loyal to Ubuntu, but to free software (aka open source). We are united by a set of ideals and work together to promote software which helps further these ideals. Why then, must all of our advocacy revolve around one GNU+Linux distribution? There are two main reasons for why it currently does.

Firstly, because Ubuntu is seen by most people as the best way to introduce new people to a (mostly) free desktop environment. It is certainly much easier to simply promote one operating system than a family of them. Still, this is no reason to limit ourselves. A team not entirely exclusive to Ubuntu can just as easily choose to promote Ubuntu exclusively for events aimed at the general public. Ubuntu may be the best now, but if something better came along or if Ubuntu went downhill, we should be able and ready to adapt. Being an Ubuntu LoCo does not provide this flexibility.

Secondly, because the infrastructure is there. Canonical provides a wiki and mailing lists to their teams and in exchange, the teams work for them, albeit loosely, as part of the Ubuntu LoCo project, under its name and banner. Canonical also provides printed install discs to officially approved teams, but there is no reason why Canonical should not provide sponsorship to any team of people who will be promoting Ubuntu. It's mutually beneficial. In the meantime, to continue receiving materials only provided to officially approved teams, LoCo's can continue to operate alongside LibrePlanet groups. This isn't all to say that Canincal has been working to actively lock teams in, but this is the effect it now has. Creating the LoCo project, providing the structure needed to establish global network of local advocacy teams, was a great service, but the time has come to grow beyond its current scope.

LibrePlanet is inspired by Ubuntu's LoCo Project, but it's instead organized around ideals, not any particular piece of software. Surely there are some who only care about what tools work best, but let's not forget the ideals which made these better tools possible. Most of us imagine a world where these ideals are universal and see an incredible amount of potential in that. LibrePlanet isn't yet another social group for GNU+Linux users, but a team of activists. These groups are more open to users of any free software who may be interested in advocacy. Sponsorship could come from Canonical, Mozilla, or whoever. Isn't this much more in line with the nature of FLOSS?

Being a LoCo does in many ways lock you in to promoting Ubuntu. You may promote other software and welcome users of other distros, but by their very title, LoCo teams exist for Ubuntu. The very reason i began taking this idea seriously is because some non-Ubuntu users wanted to get involved with an event organized by my local community team, but did not want to work under an Ubuntu banner (literally). I don't blame them. I went on to discover many people who lurk on our mailing list and even IRC channel simply hadn't gotten involved because they were put off by the exclusive nature of the group even though they do happen to use Ubuntu themselves. There is an incredible network of people out there who want to help, and we shouldn't box them out.

Many people have some badly tainted perceptions of the FSF, but being a LibrePlanet team does not require strict adherence to FSF rules. Teams could work on would be creating a voice for free software that doesn't have the (in my opinion mostly wrong) reputation of the FSF to be too extreme, and this is coming from someone who often doesn't agree with their approach. To provide an example and get the ball rolling, i'd like to announce the LibrePlanet Massachusetts Team.

Mailing list: http://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-us-ma
IRC: #libreplanet-us-ma on FreeNode

The LibrePlanet Massachusetts Team is a group of volunteers and activists organized around furthering the ideals of free software and related issues concerning digital rights and free culture.

This group is working towards a free society through free software, but we are not a local Free Software Foundation team. We share the same end goals as the FSF, but some of us may find it necessary and more effective to make some temporary compromises with proprietary software in order to better spread free software. Some of us may not necessarily say GNU+Linux or always say "free software" instead of "open source", and some of us may use pragmatic benefits to advocate free software with the understanding that freedom is the underlying concern and principle which makes it all possible. We are open to people of all levels of interest in free software and welcome new participants. We are all united in the fight for software freedom as an important and necessary means for the prospect of a free society.

You can start your own LibrePlanet chapter here: http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Form:Group