This was destined to be one of those ‘draft posts’ that I leave in various stage of completion in my gmail, or on Evernote and most don’t see the light of day.
But attendance at the (realy interesting) Mashup ‘Private Social Networking‘ event last week got me to complete this.. and also start a more detailed post for my Agency’s blog (coming this week).
So, my initial (draft) train of thought was – what alternatives are there to Facebook, either now or on the horizon and what will it take to get millions to leave it, for an alternative.
Or at least in sizable numbers. Define sizable: enough to keep content fresh, to get meaningful interaction between individuals, to allow advertisers (most things need some kind of monetising strategy) to show their wares there.. and support it with Ad revenue. E.g to keep the network sustainable. I know not all platforms need Ad revenue but you have to give members some really good functionality or content to get a subscription model adopted. Or you’re happy not to monetize it at all, of course.
Then I spotted this post about Glow, a distributed social platform and it looked interesting :
actually, the reference came via @SSethi and my comment back on the RT I sent was “ v interesting. As to adoption, hmm …”
The ‘hmm’ about adoption being, that whilst there are potential Facebook, they have a huge mountain to climb in the utility versus privacy / data ownership equation. I think more people than is given credit for accept the data trail they create and leave behind isn’t private or even ‘theirs’ but they accept that as part of the implicit deal they do with Facebook to get connections to friends, to interests etc. So Privacy per se may not be as big as selling point as one might think in marketing any alternatives.
So is there anything likely soon to gain as much traction as Facebook?
I know there are / have been other networks of course and technological / philosophical / political approaches that are polarised to the Facebook model.. but will any succeed in the long term?
Diaspora (https://diasp.org/) had a lot of buzz when it was first mooted a year ago and the promise of a distributed, open source platform. A controllable by YOU social network sounded interesting. My thoughts about Diaspora at the time, though, were that it was too tricky a concept for most people to hook into, in the few seconds / minutes you have to convince them to trial it.
There are quite a few alternative Social Networks either live (Ning as one has been around a fair while and I’ve used it a couple of times for specific projects / groups) or in development and whilst these won’t get to the scale of Facebook or twitter any time soon, that’s probably not the point. They’ll scale up for the niche or interest group that will be using them. Or at least, some of them will, others will fail as they won’t get the traction quick enough.
Btw Glow isn’t trying to be Facebook as such, it looks to be more of a blend of Facebook and Twitter and some other stuff the developer has been thinking about. And he doesn’t see it as a wholly serious commercial attempt at a Twitter / Facebook killer, it does look interesting whatever the commercial (or not) objectives.
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