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There is an enormous opportunity here for a simple social networking startup to pull the rug out from under Facebook. Just look at history. MySpace went from
by dpcan 17y ago
There is an enormous opportunity here for a simple social networking startup to pull the rug out from under Facebook.
Just look at history. MySpace went from hero to zero in the blink of an eye.
- fizx 17y agoYeah, but Myspace was incompetent.
- david927 17y agoAnd Facebook is becoming evil.
- JeffJenkins 17y agoSince when has being evil made any difference?
- dschobel 17y agoor more precisely, evil and popular are not mutually exclusive.
- stcredzero 17y agoA social network billing itself as the "anti-Facebook" with regards to privacy issues could succeed. The only thing such a network would retain control of would be related to ads. Everything else would be encrypted and controlled by users. Such a startup would have to operate like Craigslist. It would have traction because it's there to provide functionality for users, not to maximize profits. Reddit-style ads would pay for cloud resources, with the ability to opt-out by paying for services directly. By reddit-style, I mean that the ads can be shared with your friend network and voted up or down. Smartphones and the iPad could be used to implement such a network.
- DrSprout 17y agoWell, I think what we really need a standard, bare bones open source platform that implements something rational, and several providers (they would have to be fairly large ones) so that there's competition. Social networking needs to be a utility, not a walled garden. Now, one of these providers might be ad-supported, but I would gladly pay $10/month for ad-free Facebook if it was just like a hosting provider - no data crawling, no new features, basically it's the job of the people I'm paying to make sure I can back up my data and that others can access it subject to my privacy controls.
- eru 17y ago> Well, I think what we really need a standard, bare bones open source platform that implements something rational, and several providers (they would have to be fairly large ones) so that there's competition. Email anyone?
- DrSprout 17y agoIf your definition of rational includes no authentication or security.
- eru 17y agoPGP?
- stcredzero 17y agoNeeds better support for social functionality. There's too much manual work for the user and it's too easy to use in counter-productive ways.
- eru 17y agoIndeed, and that's why I prefer the way the Off-the-record handles user interaction and its security guarantees. I just wanted to point out that authentication and security for emails is possible.