2 New Social Networks With Very Different Political Twists 99
judgecorp writes "Frustrated at the off-topic chatter on Twitter, British MP Louise Mensch has launched a supposedly rival service. Despite the name, Menshn, this is apparently not a hoax, but a site aimed at 'on-topic' conversation, initially around the U.S. election. Mensch is a former 'chick lit' author, and a Member of Parliament since 2010. She has taken part in questioning of Rupert and James Murdoch, and urged control of social media." If "control of social media" urged by sitting politicians strikes you as undesirable, or the hyper-focused content seems constraining, take heart: an anonymous reader points out an online community of a different stripe — a social network launched by Wikileaks, intended to be "a secure, surveillance-resistant social network purpose-built for Friends of WikiLeaks." Whether or not your politics line up with those of most Wikileaks supporters, you might wish for some of the features FoWL is designed to provide: "By design your details are encrypted, and hidden from everyone except your immediate contacts. Even we can't access them. Connected by FoWL, friends of WikiLeaks will communicate however they like, including using secure person-to-person methods. As the network grows away from the site infrastructure, it becomes autonomous and decentralized, opaque to observers and impossible to compromise."
Louise Mensch (Score:5, Informative)
For an example of her (lack of) grasp of politics, or indeed common sense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WvAkhW-XNI [youtube.com]
Re:Attractive female politician + coder?! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:New social networks? (Score:3, Informative)
It's fine: http://diasporaproject.org/ [diasporaproject.org]
There's also Friendica, which is cross-network (you can even add diaspora users to it) and contrary to diaspora will run on quite a few shared hosts: http://friendica.com/ [friendica.com] Though public pods aren't easy to come by... care to run one? :D It may not be the fastest or the prettiest, but that's why I post the link on slashdot, and not on grandma's wall ^^ I also LOVE the tagline. "The internet is our social network." That's the spirit, and something to build on.
Also, this is a few days old and nothing is on it yet, but I'll certainly watch it: http://socialswarm.net/ [socialswarm.net] We don't need more networks, we need protocols and microformats! Most of this stuff goes completely over my head, but I hope in a few years there will be tutorials for noobs, so that even I can make my own CMS interact with social networks... IMHO, apathy and resignation just isn't on. We all have text editors, so there are no excuses. Run a little node, federate some love, get down tonight.