Life Beyond Facebook

Since those Faceless Facebook Booting Bots disabled my Facebook account a couple of weeks ago my life sure has been different. For instance not nearly as many people are reading my articles since I no longer have access to the Group I set up there to inform my readers whenever I publish a new article.

I also can now no longer inform my 300+ members of my Bush Medicine Group about my latest plans and news regarding bush medicines. I can also no longer inform members of my Jaahda's Superfoods Group that I intend to start manufacturing some 'super-foods' soon. I also cannot update members of Jaahda Jinnah Ghost Tours about progress involving setting up a Ghost Tour or two.

If I were to send out 'pasted emails' to all members of those Groups I'm pretty sure those Faceless Facebook Booting Bots would boot me into the cyber-land of further obscurities.

I really, really want my Facebook account back and have set up an off-site petition here. Please support me by signing it. This issue is much, much larger than merely getting my Facebook account reinstated.

The world is littered with thousands and thousands of people who have also been innocently booted by those Faceless Facebook Booting Bots. To my mind Facebook management violate fundamental human rights by booting innocent people who naively believe that Facebook is really about networking and communicating with friends. Facebook Managements unquenchable hunger for data gets them into many, many legal scrapes regarding privacy issues.

This 'hunger for data' seems to be at the nub of the problem. It influences the whole development of their site platform. They are so concerned about catching possible spammers that they so often ignore the lives and culture of their millions of users. And when, as often appears to happen, an innocent person such as myself gets caught up in a situation where they may need to contact lots of friends those Faceless Facebook Booting Bots boot you in an instant.

Perhaps if I attempted to contact Facebook with information about a spammer I would get a quick response. But for the innocent Facebook user such as myself I am 'guilty until proven innocent' and all attempts at contacting Facebook to remedy this situation will most likely go completely unheard by Facebook management. Hence it is highly unlikely that a user will even get a chance to ever prove their innocent intentions.

I read on one site a members suggestion that users should have a kind of 'Facebook Jail' where they could be interred for short, specified times until their innocence could be proven. This model would surely be more akin to 'real life' and much less a violation of human rights. Perhaps someone should take on and challenge Facebook in the international legal forum provided by the Geneva High Court regarding their 'guilty until proven innocent' approach.

High profile and best selling author Joel Comm chronicles on his blog site what he did when Facebook disabled his account. His story makes for an interesting read, particularly when you bear in mind his fame and acumen in the field of social networking. Joel Comm was an integral figure in the development of Facebook (and Google). Read his account of how he got his account reinstated here. Luckily Joel had contacts in very high places; an advantage that we, the more humble users of Facebook don't have.

It may well be that Facebook is doomed. That is unless they make some very fundamental and axiomatic changes. Indeed the Facebook platform has a chequered history; as also do some other high profile and popular internet platforms such as those used by Microsoft and perhaps even Apple whose problems seemingly arose out of a greed for patents and ownership of ideas and, as such that 'internet gold' called 'data'.

Mark Zuckerberg just may well be a 'leopard who won't change his spots' who shares his fundamental greed with several of his fellow internet billionaires whose platforms appear to have a history of stealing other people's good ideas and turning them into proprietorial and patented monsters whose main aim is profit, iconoclasm and world domination. I'll write more about this fascinating topic in a further article (keep posted)

Since been booted by those Faceless Facebook Booting Bots I have been researching and reading all manner of things and could surely write a whole swathe of articles around this theme and also about Facebook in particular.

I was very heartened when I came across these relatively and currently unknown fellahs called Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy who are all creative, innovative students at NYU whose collective aim is to write up, during their summer holidays an open-source alternative to Facebook.

The following quotes are taken from the Readwrite (http://www.readwriteweb.com) on the 27th May, 2010, "Why can't privacy and connectedness go hand-in-hand? That's the question being raised by those behind the new Diaspora project, an ambitious undertaking to build an "anti-Facebook" - that is, a private, open source social network that puts you back in control of your personal data.

Envisioned by four NYU computer science students, the Diaspora project would replace today's centralized social web (yes, they mean you, Facebook) with a decentralized one, while still offering something that's convenient and easy for anyone to use" (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/Diaspora_project_building_the_anti-Facebook.php). 27^th May, 2010.

In other words instead of Facebook centrally owning your profile and all of its personal data about YOU, YOU instead will own your own little social networking 'seed'

This fellahs decided to take on the task of developing and writing an "anti Facebook" platform during their summer holidays of this year and they asked for a pledge of $10,000 bucks to do so. They have far in excess achieved their goal. I pledged them some money too and would implore you all to consider doing so here. Get in quickly please as, at the time of writing this article there are only 47 hours left for you to do so.

The nub of their platform is what is known as AGPL software that complies with Ostatus principles. To better familiarize yourself with these concepts and principles please read (and watch) through the many interesting links provided at the end of this article; but suffice to say that you would effectively own your own Facebook-like profile and all the data contained therein rendering oligarchs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates begging for their daily suppers.
Now that to me sounds like an extremely excellent idea that everyone should employ and enjoy.
Please see the next page for some wonderful and interesting links for those of you seeking further information. Please bear with me as I had to write another whole sentence in order to make all the links appears on the same page so that they could all be grouped together

Fascinating further reading (and listening) Links here:

RocketBoom; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMG6oNRyApg

The Concept (youtube explanation of Diaspora by Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqxQgfQD24M

More from 'the boys'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTzRAtDujU

Readwrite Web. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/Diaspora_project_building_the_anti-facebook.php

Join Diaspora. http://www.joinDiaspora.com/

My 'off-site' petition. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/please-reinstate-jaahda-jinnah-at-facebook

Keep posted.