Diaspora, Facebook, and closed societies

Everyone wants to kill Facebook for privacy exposure (again). But this time it seems the problem has reached the mainstream, complete with a Time cover. The Diaspora project got lots of publicity from this, but they didn’t fare much better than the others and in a sense they did worse (don’t feel bad if you didn’t know there were other FOSS Facebook alternatives).

Open source contenders should avoid thinking Facebook is just a piece of software (or that just having a working piece of software is enough; for a more technical view of issues facing Facebook competitors please read this).

So what else do you need to defeat Facebook on privacy protection?

• Income without ads. Today’s advertising hates user privacy; the only way you can avoid it is by having only paid accounts.
  Unfortunately, the public thinks differently -the one mistake Facebook hasn’t made yet is billing their users, and it’s the only one people won’t ever forgive. Not even the most raging privacy advocates have suggested Facebook bills their users to eliminate the need to get income from advertising (venture capital won’t last forever).
  WordPress is a successful example of a free/paid service, but blogs aren’t social -taking Wordpress.com as a role model for social could be very dangerous, and even WordPress.com throws in an ad or two (not to mention the VIP Blogs, a category in themselves).
• Natives. Facebook grew out of schools. It was easy and logical to be part of Facebook -I mean, of your school community. Most free software alternatives have the low requirement of hosting your own server or paying someone else to do it.
  I think Facebook competitors have a better chance by embracing closed societies -schools, clubs and medium-sized organizations that don’t want to interact with the rest of the Internet and are willing to pay for the privilege (these are the customers of SocialGo, Ning and the open source elgg). Moodle integration could be a winner in the education space. Lockheed Martin’s Eureka Streams was open-sourced as a social platform for businesses (with plans of monetization by propietary extensions).

The real problem with Facebook (and most other social platforms) is that they insist on grasping the individual by the neck and making him cozy with the rest of the world, stripping him clean of anonymity and privacy, then retrofit access controls (like friend lists) to pretend to make up for it.

The myth of the global village is the first thing any social platform has to refudiate to protect user privacy.

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.