Wired.com: Open Facebook Alternatives Gain Momentum, $115K

[guruoo]

When Wired.com called for an open alternative to Facebook last Friday, lamenting the company’s untrammeled desire to control your online identity and reconfigure the world’s privacy norms, reader response was overwhelming, with hundreds of comments and ironically, thousands of “Like” votes on Facebook.

Now, a group of four New York University students — who were working on just what we called for — have harnessed that dissatisfaction in the form of more than $115,000 in crowdsourced funding for their distributed, social networking system called Diaspora. That’s the equivalent of a significant angel round of funding in the internet startup world, and their fundraising on the Kickstarter crowdsourced funding site has another 19 days to go.

It’s also an impressive for a project proposal from four students who say they aren’t going to start coding until they graduate from college this summer. And a testament to how strongly that a growing number of people want an alternative to a centralized and dominant social networking site.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-open-alternative/

[wyldwolf]

1. Facebook or (more likely) Google will buy them within a year.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

2. or Facebook will sue anyone trying to drain off their users

with a similar concept...

sP

[truedelphi]

3. Go Diaspora. Go! n/t

[cbdo2007]

4. what will happen in the future is exactly what already happened to Facebook -

they won't figure out how to make money with it until they sell all of the info about all their users and start adding more and more advertising.

That's been the problem with these "social networking" sites from the get go - how do they make money with it? Actually, they make a lot of money but they are never satisified making a good living, they always want to make more and more. This new site is going to be the exact same way as they grow bigger and bigger and try to figure out how to make more money.

1 Million Dollars is NOT 10 Million Dollars.

10 Million Dollars is NOT 100 Million Dollars.

and

100 Million Dollars is not 1 Billion Dollars.

and THAT is the problem with Facebook.

[htuttle]

5. That was ultimately the problem with Google, too

I think Yahoo used to be 4 guys.

[ccinamon]

6. +1 - once again it comes down to human greed n/t

[KamaAina]

7. Figures it'd be in New York.

R.I.P. Silicon Valley. :(