

Ask HN: Facebook alternative - would you start one? - neurotech1

With all the attention on Facebook and their privacy, or lack thereof. I'm wondering if anyone is considering creating their own social network to correct the perceived negatives of Facebook and other existing platforms.
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lehrblogger
I think Facebook is beginning to have systemic user privacy/comfort issues
resulting from their persistence in oversaturating their social graph. yan is
right in that only a tiny minority of their userbase (such as us) really cares
about this right now, but I think that in this case our concerns are leading
indicators for those of the rest of the Internet-using population.

I don't think that any site that tries to combine the entirety of the social
graph with contextually agnostic personal content will ultimately be
successful - in other words, no one wants a site where everyone they've ever
met can see what they're doing all over the Internet, and this is what
Facebook seems intent on creating. It's more than just a pure privacy concern
(where privacy means restricted access to personal information) - there's also
filtering issues, with my 'friends' being exposed to/spammed by content I
create that simply isn't _meant_ for them.

For what it's worth, I'm also actively working on an alternative to Facebook,
which will be a tool for users to partition their online social network to
match their real-world social contexts, and then use those partitions to
manage their 'friends' lists on the myriad other sites where people already
share content (Flickr, Foursquare, Vimeo, Twitter, and so on).

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yan
I don't think anyone (by anyone I mean techies or people specifically
interested in this, read: tiny minority of their user base) really cares about
this. People that do won't rush to join yet another social network and give
them more personal info in the hopes that they'd be better with it than
Facebook.

I actually think Facebook is doing the public a service by being up front with
the lack of privacy you have on the internet. Do not ever, ever assume that
you can hand over your private information to a corporation operating under US
privacy laws and hope that they'll treat it respectfully (by some conservative
definition of respectfully).

Social networks, by their very nature are about sharing personal information,
and anyone thinking otherwise should ask Facebook for a refund.

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spitfire
They care that suddenly they're on Microsoft docs.com, and their settings are
being changed. They may not look at the deeper implications, but they know
they're being jerked around and don't like it.

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anigbrowl
No, insofar as it would be so hard to get off the ground commercially. There's
already a business alternative in LinkedIn, and a lot of communities (eg
Metafilter or various specialist discussion forums) already have the rudiments
of a network in place.

I'm rather surprised nobody has made a peer authentication thing for PHP-BB or
similar, so that members of on one of the many forums running on this platform
can 'visit' another website and cross-post, if you see what I mean.

for that matter I'm surprised Google Wave hasn't been polished up yet - you'd
think Google would take advantage of their enormous user base and prior
experience with Orkut and Buzz etc. to offer robust group communication with
the requisite privacy controls by now. It's not like they don't have all the
necessary components.

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richardw
To murder any competitor, Facebook only has to change their privacy (or other
natives) "enough" - whatever prevents enough people from leaving. While you
have to create a new model from scratch, get funding, find users, build up a
platinum-standard brand...Facebook has to...jiggle the privacy settings a bit?
I'd suggest that you'd need a _seriously_ different model to succeed. Not
"Facebook with a few changes", but "something Facebook can't get to without
breaking their model".

The network effects of having every friend and family member you have on a
website is very hard to beat. Google is trying. Yes it can possibly be done,
but a couple of privacy tweaks won't do it.

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spitfire
Have you ever been in a relationship? Once trust is gone you can never get it
back. No mater how hard you try.

Once Mark Zuckerberg loses people's trust - which it seems he is doing so now,
he can never regain it.

~~~
richardw
Agreed it's a huge risk, but FB users have been getting shafted for ages in
terms of privacy, and have hardly blinked. Geeks and privacy-oriented people
yes, but most just want to share pics, see what their friends are doing and
play games. It's easier to tweak their privacy settings than move to a place
where they can't as easily (or automatically) share pics, have to build up
their friend network from scratch, and there aren't as many games.

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bgnm2000
I think theres space for creating a social network for private groups of
friends - rather than competing head on with facebook.

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vijayr
FB became big initially, because their privacy settings were strong. What is
the guarantee that a new social network starts off strong on privacy settings
etc, will not become yet another FB as they grow big? (reminds me of Animal
Farm).

End of the day, I guess it is a business and every business just cares about
their profits and keeping investors happy.

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david927
What I'm working on will have the side effect, I hope, of moving into a
competing social network but with clearer privacy constraints.

