[codeslinger]

The big thing in replacing Facebook isn't "distributed" or "central", its "what could make people switch?" Facebook came to prominence because of the elitist factor associated with top schools, the "poke" concept and its lack of "cesspool-edness" compared with MySpace.

At this point, I personally don't see how you could compete with Facebook on functionality, so what is your 10x improvement that would make people switch from Facebook to your new thing? People don't seem to be outraged enough about the privacy debacles as of yet to be making enough noise that a competitor could capture a large share just from that issue alone. (e.g. this is likely why Diaspora will fail, at least initially)

Knocking Facebook out of its top spot is much more of a economics (i.e. incentives, etc) and marketing issue than a technical one, IMO. People won't switch to a me-too; there has to be some compelling reason to move.

[marbletiles]

Absolutely. After all, Orkut and Friendster now offer almost everything people are talking about here as the bare minimum any competitor needs.

Facebook took off (after the college-only days) for two reasons:

1. For people on Myspace, it was worth moving because it didn't look like ass, and it didn't play music at you all the time. For people on Friendster, it didn't crash all the time.

2. For older people (still their growth area) it was a place that you were told could be trusted and private: you could put baby pictures on there, you could talk to people you knew, all without worrying about all those warnings your net-savvy friends were telling you about not putting things online.

You don't beat Facebook on 1: Despite Farmville, and despite their willingness to allow sheisty third-parties to clutter your news feed, they have a clean, attractive and functional site.

You beat them on 2. The reason people aren't outraged about the privacy thing is because they don't know about it. People don't visit their own profiles much, and they certainly never do it as someone else. Even if they try to lock things down they don't realise that "friend of friend" doesn't mean people-you-know, it actually means total strangers who happen to have made contact with one of the hundreds of people you know. The rules of the game were changed, and nobody told them.

That's where the opportunity is. Create a social network that is for friends only, with very few privacy settings and all defaulting to tight-as-hell, settings that are hard to unlock, and then advertise the hell out of that.

I'm sick of hearing "you don't want stuff public don't put it on the internet". The internet is bigger than that. I put my email into Gmail, on the internet, and I trust Google not to publish it. We should be able to create a trusted space where people can share things they want to keep private, and pledge that we'll make every effort to keep them that way.

Edit: Also, two things from other comments.

* If your solution needs people to have their own servers (or to make pretend that a bit of a big co is their own server), you've failed.

* If your solution includes the option of "public" comments and posts, you've failed. That's where this whole mess came from -- from Zuckerberg deciding that Twitter was hot and adding "public" to a Facebook that was built on private.

[tokenadult]

You beat them on 2.

Correct. A lot of us joined Facebook because we thought we had reliable privacy. To see data that we submitted become public after previously being less public is quite off-putting. I called it "contempt for customer" in another HN thread, and the reply was that Facebook's customers are actually advertisers. True enough. But commercial broadcast television, another advertiser-supported service, doesn't allow certain kinds of programming or certain ways of interacting with viewers (users), because advertisers don't want users to be upset and stop using. This is Facebook's long-term problem.

[blizkreeg]

Couldn't agree more.

Personally, I would love to have something like a Yammer/Facebook that is invite-only and absolutely, completely private. In fact, it should not be searchable. You should not be searchable. And there's no getting around that. No one except the people I personally tell should know that I'm part of this network. The word 'clique' comes to mind when I think of what could beat Facebook at it's own game. In school, college, or in your job, you can only get into a certain clique or group if they personally invite you and deem you trustworthy and close enough to be part of the gang. On a network such as this, you could have different cliques - one for your family and relatives, one for very close friends, and one for your immediate family let's say. That's about it.

I often share things with a handful of my close friends via email. I don't put it on Facebook because I have a lot of just "acquaintances" that I don't want to share this stuff with.

I think a network where the concept of "adding a friend" doesn't exist, nor does the concept of "public" is probably what will take some fraction of people away from Facebook. If you mimic what happens in real life, you invite a whole bunch of friends and acquaintances to a Friday night house party, not to your family Thanksgiving dinner.

[someplacecold]

Yes, but the story of why Facebook is successful is more involved than that, and much more useful than you give it credit for.

Facebook started because Mark Zuckerberg was notorious for hacking yearbook pictures out of a sort of Harvard-official online phonebook (a "facebook") and setting a website to mash them up against each other in a hot-or-not style competition. Capitalizing on this notoriety, he was able to replace the original "facebook" directory, commenting to the Crimson something to the effect "I can do it better, and I can do it in two weeks".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-network-face... << fascinating, maybe not the best source

After that, yes, there is very probably some truth to the fact that it may have pandered to the elitism of ivy league schools, but the real lesson here is that Facebook had access to probably the best audience of any social networking site, ever -- a group of highly-social shakers and movers -- and was able to expand because there were similar needs in other similar schools. There have been probably hundreds of social networking sites that never failed to take off; this is, IMO, the key factor that separates them. The other thing is that, they were lucky about the network they were replacing; an online student directory translates very well into a MySpace alternative, as MySpace is arguably really a tool to interact in the world of MySpace. People were ready to be themselves online, they just needed good privacy control.

A startup like Diaspora does not have the luxury of a built-in user base like the Harvard student body. Nor does it replace a very extensible tool that everyone likes/needs. These are all very big disadvantages.

[percept]

Maybe some view Facebook as the new cesspool.

This would be a great time for a competitor to capitalize on the bad press and differentiate themselves with a more compelling alternative.

I guess the question as always is how to reach the "normals"?