Please, somebody, create a facebook competitor! Don't wait for Diaspora; I don't think their idea will work for the average user. This market desperately needs competition!
Facebook only works because everyone is on the same site.
A competitor would never gain enough traction to reach critical mass (defined as when the average person has an account on both) without some help from facebook in the form of a stupid business decision. Or if they managed to think of some killer feature.
But simply a copy will never work.
And BTW, the main reason you hate facebook is because they are big. So adding a competitor will not help you - eventually they will get big too, and you will hate them as well.
No, the main reason we hate facebook is because they are trying to press criminal charges on a company. Also, they keep changing what data they make accessable publicly, without warning, and have a ridiculous system of letting you chnage what is private/public.
In one sense - facebook becomes a natural monopoly. Back in say 2007/8 I had to log in to both facebook and myspace to see what my friends were up to. Now I just have to use facebook. That is much simpler and easier for me as a user.
That is the way facebook wants it to be but that could change. For now, you must log on to their service, see their ads and be exposed to their new mesmerizing features in order to connect to your facebook friends. The goal of this lawsuit is for applications like Power to be allowed to let users not need to log on to the facebook website to do this.
Maybe now, but a new competitor could do two things:
Be better in some way than facebook (not selling users private information would be an easy one)
Make it so that you could see what you friends were upto on facebook, but without being a user yourself.
Suddenly you cracked the chicken and egg problem, which is exactly why facebook goes after this with the force of the law.
A monopoly based on technology never lasts, but if you can build one on some kind of legal issue, you are golden.
I don't think they've entirely thought it through, but I understand they're working with open standards and talking to other similar projects. I think eventually some standards-based distributed alternative will come together, although I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed when Diaspora launches.
Well, you could probably get 30,000 people from quitfacebookday.com as a start. And if you are a viable competitor to facebook, you would probably get some good, free media coverage. If your product is good I don't think it would be hard to get your first million users. There are plenty of people dissatisfied enough with facebook to at least give a competitor a try.
And the marketing would be easy, as facebook isn't branded as the nice guy, but as the jerk.
What I miss is some website where I can choose who gets to read what I write: this post is for everbody, this is only for my family, this is for my work mates, this is for the general public, this is for my brother.
The advantage of this would be that you could move groups over one at a time (since they would get some benefit from it, people would want to use it) and it is something facebook can't do and don't want to.
> What I miss is some website where I can choose who gets to read what I write: this post is for everbody, this is only for my family, this is for my work mates, this is for the general public, this is for my brother.
If an application can see some data that wasn't shared with me, then I agree that's a pretty big problem. That an application I give access to see my data can see, well, my data, isn't a problem in my view.
Once your information is in Bobs hands, what he does with it is out of your control. Even if we consider a network that doesn't allow apps, what if Bob downloads SleazoCo Birthday Reminder (comes build-in with your Bonzi Buddy) that scrapes your birthday from the site? At least Facebooks terms forbids app-producers to save anything about users for more than absolutely needed, and SleazoCo can theoretically be banned from making FB apps if caught in violation of this.
Unless we're willing to consider DRM for social networks, this won't change with Diaspora or any other kind of software that puts your birthday on Bobs computer in any kind of standardized format.
Have you read You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier? I think you might like it. There is an entire section devoted to exactly what you just said, and how facebook essentially "removes the individuality" from its users.
At the same time he makes huge mental leaps that I completely disagree with (he said basically the same thing about open source/open culture) but there are several gems in the book.
