The founders of Diaspora*, courtesy of Diaspora*
Can four college students take down Facebook? If there was ever a time to try, it would be now.
Neal Gorenflo discussed the growing Facebook backlash earlier this week, and offered his wish list for an alternative social network. Without a credible alternative, however, a lot of us are reluctant to take the plunge and cancel our accounts. With over 500 million users, Facebook isn't merely ubiquitous--it's the connective tissue that binds you to your friends, family, professional contacts and once-forgotten acquaintances. It'll take a compelling challenger to take down Facebook. Four NYU students are stepping up, announcing Diaspora*, a fully open-source, privacy-minded alternative.
The Diaspora* model is reminiscent of Wordpress, the blogging software available as either a freemium hosted service or a self-hosted platform. Diaspora* allows users to host their own instances of the social networking software on their own servers. These social networking islands--or seeds, as the developers describe them--can speak to and interact with one another, enabling a non-centralized social network. Since practically anyone can host their own Diaspora* seed, users can ensure their privacy to a trusted provider.
The response in the media and online has been stunning. Demonstrating the degree of anti-Facebook sentiment, Diaspora*'s Kickstarter page has raised over $100,000 in the two days since the project was profiled at the New York Times. As of this writing, "how do I delete my Facebook account?" is Google's fifth-highest search suggestion to the query "how do I". The uproar has reached such a mass that Facebook, which often ignores user complaints, has called an all-hands meeting to discuss privacy policies at 4:00pm this afternoon.
Despite all of this buzz, a number of tech pundits are skeptical about the Diaspora project. Cnet's Matt Asay is dubious that a solution which requires deployment on an individual's server will gain the critical mass of users necessary for social networking services to be useful. Asay points to identi.ca, the privacy-minded Twitter clone that has failed to catch fire outside of coder and hacker circles. Wired's Epicenter blog is also skeptical, citing a study that states that only users 35-and-over care about Facebook privacy concerns. (Though the Diaspora* developers' youth seems to undermine such claims.)
As a Facebook user who is strongly critical of the company's recent policy changes, I'm optimistic and encouraged by the overwhelming response to Diaspora, and see much potential in an open-source alternative to Facebook. Still, I have some questions and concerns of my own: Will a paid hosted version a la Wordpress.com prove to be a sustainable business model? Will the know-how necessary to set up and host your own Diaspora* seed turn off non-technical users? To what extent will each deployment interoperate with one another--will people on one seed interact with people on another seed seamlessly, or will there be incompatibilities?
Achieving the necessary critical mass of users is another concern: considering the difficulty Google has had launching their own social networking service Buzz, with an already massive built-in user base, it's clear that any competitor to the Facebook behemoth has a steep uphill climb ahead of it. It will be essential for the development community around Diaspora* to follow Wordpress example and make a concerted effort to evangelize about its ease-of-use to non-technical users. There are already plenty of open-source social networking platforms for geeks; what we need is an open-source social networking platform our Moms will feel comfortable using.
It's difficult to answer many of these questions at this point--the project is very early in its development cycle--but the discussion and buzz around Diaspora* remains exciting, no matter the ultimate result. Certainly, other open-source social networking projects exist, such as Elgg and Drupal, a popular content management system which has been adopted more as a publishing platform than for its social networking features. But these other projects have failed to ignite the popular imagination or attract media coverage in the way that Diaspora* has over the past few days. This demonstrates that there is a growing public sentiment against Facebook and its policies, as well as enthusiasm for a distributed, open-source alternative. For privacy advocates and open source fans alike, this can only be a good thing.
Learn more about Diaspora* here, and donate to the project on Kickstarter.
Comments
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 05.14.10, 7:01am:
I'm surprised that more people haven't raised a more fundamental use of alternative social network structures: to pressure Facebook to change its ways and improve the experience. From a simple capitalist perspective, you could read that as "competition is good." But you can also look at it through a social movement perspective: setting up alternative structures provides a laboratory and a lever for moving mainstream structures in a more positive direction. So in other words, even if efforts like this one fail, they could still succeed by pushing the mainstream in a more open, positive direction.
That said, I find the idea of a social network that is an open source commons to be extremely appealing.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Paul M. Davis wrote on 05.14.10, 7:30am:
I agree Neal, it would be difficult but not impossible for an upstart to take down Facebook, for the very reasons you mention. In the game space, though, there already appears to be growing dissatisfaction--news broke this week that Zynga, the company behind Farmville, are in a high-profile battle with Facebook and that Zynga is interested in creating its own social gaming service--http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article7125932.ece
One of the most difficult things to overcome, when a social network reaches the mass that Facebook has, is the sheer inertia of less-tech-savvy users: for many people, Facebook has become all the Internet they need, where they get their news, information, communication, and gaming needs met. The "AOL 2.0" cracks that people are making are not inaccurate. Getting the mass of non-techie users to jump ship will be the hard part, but as evidenced by the fall of Myspace, not impossible.
Gabriel Levinson wrote on 05.14.10, 7:50am:
Nothing that raises $100,000 in two days is going to be concerned with your privacy for too long. Doesn't matter how its packaged, this isn't an alternative to Facebook, its simply the next Facebook.
$100,000 in two days?!
The idiots have spoken.
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 05.14.10, 9:30am:
Gabriel, I tend to agree unless Diaspora makes very deliberate moves to offer ownership, decision making, and governance to users through something like a coop structure. Unless they do this, the project will likely go down the path of least resistance which is toward getting private investment / venture capital (VC) money.
And here will be the real travesty. If it succeeds, all those people who kicked in money at the beginning will get zero while VCs will stand to make millions. That's actually worse than Facebook in some ways.
That being said this group is starting out with a completely different spirit and intention than Facebook. Facebook was founded on a betrayal and continues to betray. Having a completely different spirit might bode well, though some infrastructure behind this intention would make me more of a believer.
Paul M. Davis wrote on 05.14.10, 9:48am:
I don't think the business-model comparison between Diaspora and Facebook quite fits. This is a decentralized, open-source project that exists on individual servers. It shares more in common with projects like Wordpress or Drupal than it does Facebook. You're not trusting Diaspora-as-Facebook-replacement with your info, you'd be entrusting the owner of the server that hosts whatever seed you choose to use. Meaning, you could shop around and find the Diaspora provider you trust. Or even host your own.
Gabriel Levinson wrote on 05.14.10, 1:24pm:
Neal and Paul,
These were viewpoints I hadn't considered. My pessimism comes, as of late, from being consumed with rage at how extraordinarily apathetic so many Facebook users are to their privacy.
Generations younger than ourselves have essentially been "born into" this way of social networking; its what they know and for them its become a shrug of the shoulders. Perhaps its the benefit of hindsight, as we have witnessed Facebook's rise from the get-go, but its maddening that there aren't more heads banging against the wall.
Its hard to take anti-Facebook sentiment seriously when such sentiment comes from someone with an active Facebook account. You can't have it both ways and staying active on Facebook gives Facebook the support they need to keep on keepin' on.
And maybe Diaspora* can be the next step: If the hype is real, and if they keep to their word, this could be just the example needed to wake up the younger generations.
Rick Smith wrote on 05.16.10, 5:38pm:
Facebook began as a Myspace alternative for college-educated people who were more "real-world" socially connected than their Myspace counterparts. Its attention to design details, simplicity, and user accesibility made it the go-to choice for people who no longer wanted to spend hours customizing their site. Add to that the mind-numbing pain of simultaneously downloading the myriad content people put on their MySpace pages, and you've got the the perfect storm for Facebook's initial ascent, driven by social elites and the 2008 elections.
Twitter, too, gained momentum because of its capacity to report accurate, real-time events faster than any other service. Additionally, it was co-opted by Ashton Kutcher and several other high-profile socialites, driving it to the front of the social pack. Again, the 2008 elections did not hurt its reputation.
The real challenge for Diaspora* is going to be critical mass. In the world of network analysis, one of the most common findings is that nodes which are more effective at aggregation, continue to become more and more so. In lay terms, the rich get richer.
If Diaspora* is to really overcome Facebook, or even market itself as a viable alternative, it will have to amass an online following on the order of (in my opinion) 30-40% of Facebook's current users. Between 150 and 200 million users is a very, very steep hill to climb.
My view - Diaspora needs to become effective in time for the mid-term elections. It was, arguably, social media that really changed our country's political landscape during 2008, and the elections changed which services (Twitter, Facebook) citizens chose to use. If Diaspora reaches critical mass prior to the heat of the campaigns (which will get ugly this year, make no mistake), it will cement itself into not only our social, but also our political landscape. If it misses the mark, my guess is that it will remain in the hands of the technically savvy but socially unconnected.
ed whymandesign.com wrote on 05.22.10, 4:09pm:
Sounds great:) would it be possible to help you to make a re skinned version of any existing software (using existing open source) so we can help the public to solve other social issues (Ideally using that http://www.TRAIDmark.org/ business structure)? Maybe working with someone like http://www.ONEworldHEALTH.org/ or http://www.earth.org/ which is closing so maybe ... See Morethis is something I could help you take on so
everyone can share local knowledge? Also can http://www.WEBiversity.org/ share video's and create http://www.TRUSTlibrary.org/ with your
team? Ed http://www.WHYMANdesign.com/
Paul, nice post! Good analysis. The network effects around Facebook are powerful, and as those in the tech industry know well, network effects can trump product considerations. That means that products with inferior attributes can win if they get the jump and lock in the market.
This being said, the switching costs are fairly low in this space. Look at what happened to Friendster then Myspace, the once champions of the space. People picked up and moved on over to FB.
The difference this time is that Facebook has become a platform for other services, like its addictive social games, and has woven itself into the very fabric of the web with Facebook Connect. Unlike the earlier leaders, FB isn't simply a discrete service that you can walk away from.
Bottom line for me is that I don't think it's impossible for a new service to overtake Facebook, just really hard and harder than it used to be.