Privacy is a major concern. But, also, functionality is very important. If you want to topple Facebook do two things: Guarantee privacy and revolutionize fun

Privacy is a major concern. But, also, functionality is very important. If you want to topple Facebook do two things: Guarantee privacy and revolutionize functionality. Here's how: Privacy; The Zero-Knowledge Database. By relying upon the client to compute deterministic indexes based upon user-input, you can abstract the relations from the database into the client space. The result is that you have two items, say a pet and owner that look like this: Pet: id afb142, name Spot Owner: id dsf513, name Data When Data logs in with his username and password, those values are never sent to the server -- instead, they're used along with other information to create keys <afb142> and <dsf513>. This process is deterministic given the sign-on data, but difficult to reverse-engineer (a one-way, trapdoor function or hash). So, Data knows his pet is Spot, but anyone else, even with full access to the database, doesn't. This database design facilitates collaborative filtering, demographics analysis, et cetera. On Functionality: Pro-active social networking. Facebook loses because it tells you what you know (or what your friends know). We've seen that globalization's promise of expanding our horizons is wrong -- we only become more niched. Yet, despite being very focused on a few topics, no one is exploiting this in a useful way. If you know that I enjoy older Country music and that I like a well-made cocktail, why can't your social networking site hook me up with a suggestion about what to do this weekend? Right now, most people hear about new things through their contacts. But, their contacts have to be introduced to them through exploration or diffusion through their contacts. This process is slow and requires extensive contact networks of people with similar interest to find one another. The system, however, knows who likes Hank Williams and it knows who likes a perfect Vesper. Through some basic analysis; why can't it suggest to me a bar and a band this weekend based upon what other people with similar taste are doing? Imagine waking up in the morning and logging into NotFacebook... it tells you about a few articles on HN, Reddit, and a number of blogs. Some are bloggers you know and love while others are new-to-you bloggers writing about subjects you enjoy. The system also recommends dinner at a restaurant that's recently enjoyed positive reviews from your fellow mushroom-hating, meat-loving epicureans. I knows you and Sam are free (Sam has similar taste, after all, and is a good friend of yours). That would kill Facebook, I think.