| 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. |
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.