[decasia]

I think this is exactly right. Users expect a really nice, contemporary-feeling UX. And for something that cost money it would have to be above and beyond.

That said, the fact is that the mainstream alternatives are handicapped by their own success and are afraid to change anything of their core features. Starting a new platform would be an opportunity to revisit many of the original design choices, and perhaps one could do surprising new things at that point.

I think the co-operative model is interesting economically as well because as far as I can tell, there are at least some cases where it does work out to be economically stable on a reasonably long term basis (decades anyway), and I presume it changes things a lot, organizationally, if the main goal isn't just "lowest common denominator software for the sake of maximal mass adoption and growth."

[athenot]

The angle we can exploit is to find all the places where UX is degraded by advertisement, and attack them. With increased competition and shareholder expectation, Facebook will have no choice but maximize the value they can extract out of each user. Right now they are doing a fairly good job at keeping things minimally intrusive, but I think that boundary is going to shift with time.