With respect to "telling something to some of your friends", and attempting to do so "privately", there are certainly ways to do this without using Facebook.
However, that was only a specific example I chose, in line with veb's example of telling people you rub lettuce on your face, to use to illustrate to scott a point about whether only large networks could be useful in order to stay in touch with a small number of people, i.e., your friends. In theory, I could use any online activity or any service/protocol as an example to illustrate what the "solution" (a small private network) aims to achieve.
Talking (VOIP e.g. SIP), smtp (email), IRC and http (web forums), to use your examples, are examples of services/protocols that can be run over a network. Of course it is not an exhaustive list.
You could run them over the open internet, i.e. a very large, public network (of networks).
You could also run them over a small private network to which only a selection of people belong, e.g., your friends.
In theory, anything you could do with your friends on Facebook you could also do with your friends on your own small private network.
Multiplayer games is something for which this idea of "being on the same network", all at the same time, is well-suited. This is not a new concept. It is a very old one. Consequently, it's time-tested.
But playing games is only one example of what you can do.
The internet supports many services.
Theoretically, so too can your smaller network.
An obvious difference between doing things on the open internet (Facebook) and doing them on your own network is: _privacy_.
You do not have to invite advertisers and countless others to your private network if you do not want to. Might this be important to some people? That is an open question.
_Privacy_, of the kind discussed in the Facebook context, is the goal which the "solution" we are discussing aims to address.
Not simply "private mesaging" but privacy in everything you do with your friends online.
Rest assured, even if such a solution did exist and could be shown to work (NAT and whatever other issues you might predict have been solved), all the Facebook-type user interface doo-dahs are noticeably absent.
As such, it is a non-starter for any friend who cannot use a command line, unless some very good user interface developers got behind it.
With respect to "telling something to some of your friends", and attempting to do so "privately", there are certainly ways to do this without using Facebook.
However, that was only a specific example I chose, in line with veb's example of telling people you rub lettuce on your face, to use to illustrate to scott a point about whether only large networks could be useful in order to stay in touch with a small number of people, i.e., your friends. In theory, I could use any online activity or any service/protocol as an example to illustrate what the "solution" (a small private network) aims to achieve.
Talking (VOIP e.g. SIP), smtp (email), IRC and http (web forums), to use your examples, are examples of services/protocols that can be run over a network. Of course it is not an exhaustive list.
You could run them over the open internet, i.e. a very large, public network (of networks).
You could also run them over a small private network to which only a selection of people belong, e.g., your friends.
In theory, anything you could do with your friends on Facebook you could also do with your friends on your own small private network.
Multiplayer games is something for which this idea of "being on the same network", all at the same time, is well-suited. This is not a new concept. It is a very old one. Consequently, it's time-tested.
But playing games is only one example of what you can do.
The internet supports many services.
Theoretically, so too can your smaller network.
An obvious difference between doing things on the open internet (Facebook) and doing them on your own network is: _privacy_.
You do not have to invite advertisers and countless others to your private network if you do not want to. Might this be important to some people? That is an open question.
_Privacy_, of the kind discussed in the Facebook context, is the goal which the "solution" we are discussing aims to address.
Not simply "private mesaging" but privacy in everything you do with your friends online.
Rest assured, even if such a solution did exist and could be shown to work (NAT and whatever other issues you might predict have been solved), all the Facebook-type user interface doo-dahs are noticeably absent.
As such, it is a non-starter for any friend who cannot use a command line, unless some very good user interface developers got behind it.