A billion users cant be wrong

This Facebook post caught my eye:

facebook steals data

And i giggled inside.  It is the same silly notion that many Czechs had after the Berlin Wall came down – that democracy and the will of the people would rule the land.

I also thought that it was funny that the poster thought 0.1% of Facebooks 1 billion users would represent much of a ground swell for this company.  FB is moved by greater forces.

Facebook has an objective, it is not simple – it has dominating the social network ecosystem, increasing e-commerce potential for them, charging micro fees for services for users and several grades of premium users.  It has timing for these services and restrictions planned out to not annoy too many addicts, i mean users, at once.

because i want your money, perhaps?

because i want your money, perhaps?

And we have a mission, which we are largely ignoring, which is to create an open source social networking service, which does what is most useful about FB, but without all the poisonous corporate extras.  In a parallel life i am working with some hot group of coders in a crowded duplex in Palo Alto crafting just such a thing now.

These are some of the design features:

  • Non profit/volunteer based platform
  • no filtering
  • all data belongs to users
  • Opt in ads where you get (perhaps) half the ad revenue for watching them
  • real services – barter facilitation, tripper like services, gifting circle and all manner of non-monetary exchanges.

There is much more to say about what comes after FB and how we promote it.  But this is enough for today.