I don't get Foursquare from a users' perspective, but the possibilities of location-based marketing make it a no-brainer investment from a business standpoint. Their situation is the inverse of Twitter searching for a business model, if that makes sense. Foursquare just needs to figure out how to appeal to "normals" and they will be golden.
No disrespect to joshu (who is around), but I never had a single non-techie friend who used delicious. For whatever reason, only reddit (and to a lesser extent Digg) have been able to break out of the geek echo chamber when it comes to social news. Slashdot, which had a 6-10 year jump on all of them, never could do it either.
EDIT #2: I don't mean to call them out on their integrity or anything. I'm mostly surprised that someone at YC didn't advise them to take more time to 'own' their look.
we went with copying what works rather than spending too much time trying to re-invent a good homepage. we launched pretty quick, so we tried to focus as much on the core features first as possible.
It looks to me like they are only trying to prevent third parties from cluttering the official stream with third-party paid tweets. Not really anything for developers to get riled up about.
I have a friend who is an engineer at a wind turbine startup here in the US and he has told me that most of their prototypes are bought by big names in Hollywood for "eco-bling" as well.
The eventual Facebook replacement will look nothing like Facebook in terms of functionality. I wouldn't give a penny to a startup/project that positioned themselves against Facebook like this. Any variation of an "Open Facebook" of some sort is bound to fail.
Facebook's real problem is not user backlash from their privacy shortcomings, but the future of social networking in general. Some visionary will beat them to the future while they are busy milking the status quo.
If that kind of advancement can be built into a well-engineered product with good UX, then we might really be looking at something that could start siphoning a bit of market share from Facebook.
That's not visionary only because that's what Facebook should have been from the beginning.
All early internet protocols where distributed before the web became companies playground and Conway law followed.
I think a visionary replacement will happen when something will just replace the cloud (which is too often a data ghetto) by giving users a way to easily and completely control their data and services, local as well as remote, in a homogeneous and synchronized way. A merge between the two approaches: "everything on the web" and "everything on your computer". Data (and metadata) and services being identities, media, documents, events, tags, access rights, version history, and links between all those things... So all this without giving all your data to google :)
There's a lot of things this project could do without replacing Facebook that I'd still consider successful. Four people thinking hard about making social networking better than Facebook for a summer could help "the eventual Facebook replacement" be better than it otherwise would be, even if this project itself doesn't turn into that replacement.
It's me who's framed them specifically as a Facebook replacement in this post, and certainly what they're doing is a reaction to Facebook's issues.
But if you read their project description, it doesn't sound like what they're building only duplicates Facebook's functionality. They're talking about providing software to give you your own portable persistent data vault, that you can selectively allow other people & services to access, while keeping the ability to remove their access at any time.
That's pretty cool, and it has the potential for a lot more uses than what Facebook is doing.
Every other day, I get invited to join some "protest against Facebook's plans to introduce usage fees" group. I never got invited to a "protest against Facebook's privacy policies" group. (There may be such groups but none of my friends have ever mentioned it.)
Maybe positioning a competitor as "guaranteed to always be free" could be a better plan (even when FB will likely always be free).
I couldn't disagree more. A federated network of world facing webservers goes far beyond what anyone is presently offering. This idea is older than facebook. I would love for someone to pull it off.
Google could leapfrog into the next "Facebook" by doing to VNC/Remote Desktop/Hosting what they did to email with gmail. Give everyone a usable remote pc (whose interface adjusts according to the device accessing it) , one with cloud capabilities and the ability to install web applications with a few clicks. If there will ever be a decentralized FB that works through the semantic web, each application will need to be hooked in and have the ability to spider and data-mine, and always-on cloud-based pc's are the answer to that. Open sourcing such a system should also go without saying, otherwise all the hosting companies out there would probably go out of business :)
Actually jfornear, yes it is visionary. To think otherwise means you have only skimmed their material.
Based on their posts, they appear to be positioning themselves as a "Facebook Killer" solely to take advantage of the current backlash against Facebook (considering their current funding, I would say it's working). What they are attempting to create transcends anything we currently have; the closest you might come would be if you hosted a cryptographically secured peer-to-peer server only your friends could access (once you have that, now make it easily replicable and spread it across the net).
