Facebook Challengers Part – 2

Who are the others?

It would seem, however, that social networking has reached a critical mass and is at a crossroads. Until now, there have been largely closed and centralized environments along the lines of mobile phone carriers that only allow you to call others who use the same provider for free. In addition to a solid interface design and usability foundation, the best ways (David’s slingshot, as it were) to challenge Facebook is on issues of privacy, data ownership and decentralization. Already a number of notable projects are in the works that address those issues and I shall briefly mention a few. The Appleseed project is working to create an open source, fully distributed and decentralized social networking software. In effect any entity would be able to create compatible websites which users can join. And if you decide you don’t like the site you’re on, you can sign up for another Appleseed compatible site and immediately reconnect with everyone in your network. OneSocialWeb is creating protocols that allow for communication between social networks meaning that if you meet a friend on another network you wouldn’t have to create a new profile just to connect with them. Perhaps the project that picked up the most buzz is Diaspora, “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open-source social network”, after it received pledges of $175,000 from over 4,600 people on Kickstarter after asking for only $10,000! It will be interesting to see how social networks will evolve over the next couple of years.