Free basic internet may include Google search, Wikipedia, email of choice, access to all pages that Google suggests in first two pages. But I think Facebook should not be part of basic internet.
Agree to what you say. Facebook is great in some cases, like finding your old buddy from college or school. I use FB to find them, but after that I get their email ids and from then on its email communication. So for me FB is the place to find people.
But FB is not for getting news about the topics I like; because, IMHO like the OP, Facebook news feed is broken for this purpose. Yes it is broken if you like to get news and information related to your interests. The prime reason, which I have discovered over the years of using FB, is I like things which my friends do not like a lot and vice-versa. I cannot blame Facebook for this. So when they like something which I do not, I still get the news in the feed. The same thing is happening in Twitter.
I felt that it would be better if we can follow information we like rather than the people we like. This way we will be able to get the information that we want/like rather than the noise. A critical step towards this is tags and if we can follow a tag it would be better [1].
I agree, but people have always followed the information they want.
Online, that's as old as Usenet, and it continued through topics on CompuServe and AOL. It continues today through specialised forums and bulletin boards, especially the forums on subject-based websites. Good ones include AV Forums, Hydrogen Audio, DPReview, Doom9 etc.
Anyone who thinks Facebook is, or is meant to be, a substitute for Doom9 is extremely dim.
I think Facebook is getting into "follow information" as well. Recently I've started getting items in my newsfeed from pages I've never visited or liked, with the header "<page> posted about <topic from my profile>"
The web design needs a re-thinking from all points mentioned in OP. +1 for the counter, these are not only worthless information but also sometimes takes so much time to load the web sites.
We have created a project to access GDrive, Dropbox, SkyDrive and Box from web browser. We have some plans to open up the API in the future. If you guys think that's useful.
Looks nice and neat. It would be great if you could expand the examples a bit more. One more thing, could you please provide some examples with form validation.
We built ScoopSpot[1] to make microblog better, one of the core proposition was to allow the application developers work with the statuses more openly. However, it didn't caught attention of the people. One interesting aspect of ScoopSpot was to allow user follow a tag or topic.
The possibility of application built on what users' interests are limitless (at least that's what I think). I will look into the protocol of OStatus to see how can we make our API's open.
[1]https://www.scoopspot.com
People at Twitter must realize that when developers talk about your API's tos rather than the API, you must have broken something. It reminds me Facebook episode of network feed and privacy. At the end of it, Mark understood what the users were talking about and took action to correct it.
The problem seems like an issue of making profit by showing promotional tweets, which will not happen in the clients. It, to me, looks like the problem of management which could not come up with better revenue model.
