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If you feel trapped inside Facebook b/c your friends keep you there, you can start a Campaign for your favorite new/open social network on https://www.iWouldDo.

by benevol 12y ago

If you feel trapped inside Facebook b/c your friends keep you there, you can start a Campaign for your favorite new/open social network on https://www.iWouldDo.it/ https://www.iWouldDo.it/ and start having your friends migrate. This new tool specifically offers a way to beat the "prison effect" of products that are subject to the network effect.

soylentcola 12y ago
I still think it's futile for most people. Like a lot of other people, I begrudgingly use Facebook because it's an easy way to engage in "low priority" communication with lots of friends and family. Mass emails or texting is too demanding whereas the Facebook style of communication you can take or leave when you feel like logging in to read random posts. The issue you touched on won't be easy to fight. I think that as long as these social platforms don't need to use any common protocol (like email), the natural state is to have a single major player with smaller ones maintaining pressure to improve and add new features. I'm apparently one of the only people who likes Google+ for this sort of thing but no matter how hard I decided to bug and annoy people, there's no way I'd convince enough of them to migrate all of that stuff over there. Same goes for any other competitor. And unless you want to maintain redundant profiles for more effort (and more of the unavoidable marketing stuff) you can't just strike out on your own without defeating the purpose. The fact that Facebook was the first to get your mom and your professor and your boss and your mailman to sign up means that they've got an incredible advantage. There's just no way to get that many people to opt into something else, especially as resistant to change as many are. And unlike email, I can't just switch to G+ and keep bullshitting with my friends on Facebook like I switched to Gmail and kept emailing friends at Yahoo or Hotmail. Imagine if in order to change email providers, you had to convince everyone else to switch as well. We'd still be using our AOL addresses from 1993.
- benevol 12y ago
  > There's just no way to get that many people to opt into something else Not in one day. It's always a process. And with a system like iWouldDo.it, you "switch hypothetically" (using a pledge with a condition) and when your condition is met (i.e. "Alice, Bob and Chris are ready to switch, too"), you switch for real. Which results in other peoples' conditions being met, which makes them switch as well, etc. etc.

by benevol 12y ago

soylentcola 12y ago

I still think it's futile for most people. Like a lot of other people, I begrudgingly use Facebook because it's an easy way to engage in "low priority" communication with lots of friends and family. Mass emails or texting is too demanding whereas the Facebook style of communication you can take or leave when you feel like logging in to read random posts. The issue you touched on won't be easy to fight. I think that as long as these social platforms don't need to use any common protocol (like email), the natural state is to have a single major player with smaller ones maintaining pressure to improve and add new features. I'm apparently one of the only people who likes Google+ for this sort of thing but no matter how hard I decided to bug and annoy people, there's no way I'd convince enough of them to migrate all of that stuff over there. Same goes for any other competitor. And unless you want to maintain redundant profiles for more effort (and more of the unavoidable marketing stuff) you can't just strike out on your own without defeating the purpose. The fact that Facebook was the first to get your mom and your professor and your boss and your mailman to sign up means that they've got an incredible advantage. There's just no way to get that many people to opt into something else, especially as resistant to change as many are. And unlike email, I can't just switch to G+ and keep bullshitting with my friends on Facebook like I switched to Gmail and kept emailing friends at Yahoo or Hotmail. Imagine if in order to change email providers, you had to convince everyone else to switch as well. We'd still be using our AOL addresses from 1993.

benevol 12y ago
> There's just no way to get that many people to opt into something else Not in one day. It's always a process. And with a system like iWouldDo.it, you "switch hypothetically" (using a pledge with a condition) and when your condition is met (i.e. "Alice, Bob and Chris are ready to switch, too"), you switch for real. Which results in other peoples' conditions being met, which makes them switch as well, etc. etc.