This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email, feed reader. Of all Google services, you’d think the hardest to replace would be search. Yet, although search is critical for navigating the web, […]
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This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email. Next to email, replacing Google Reader as my feed reader was relatively easy, though I’ve chosen to use the move as an opportunity to […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders included in Facebook’s IPO filing contains a pretty bold vision for Facebook to not just connect people and enable them to share, but to fundamentally restructure the way that the world works: By helping people form these connections, we […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. in 2007, the Songwriters Association of Canada gained some international headlines with a proposal to legalize non-commercial peer-to-peer file sharing through an ISP levy. This sort of proposal wasn’t new, but had not been so prominently put forth by an artist organization before. There […]
I’ve begun to write about free (libre) network services, and the hazards of being a tenant on the web instead of a property owner. I began slowly moving away from Google in 2009, but I’ve accelerated that process since the launch of Google+. I thought I’d begin to share my […]
When the “Like” button was first introduced on Facebook, it was a useful alternative to leaving a comment, another way to show you were paying attention, but it crept from posts to comments and pages, and it now permeates every aspect of the Facebook experience and defines the entire ethos […]
Via the FreedomBox Foundation, J David Eisenberg has created a great comic introduction to distributed social network services. Distributed systems are an important part of free network services.
There are many things I like about Google+, but, beyond being yet another proprietary social networking service, something just doesn’t sit well with me about Google’s primary purpose. Comments by Brad Horowitz that Google+ will be connected to everything Google are a good example of what concerns me: Google+ is […]
A couple years ago, I would have said that network services and mobile computing were two new frontiers for software freedom, two new challenges, two new battles. But, despite some key differences, these two areas are so closely related and that I think we need a unified vision for addressing […]