UPDATE: When I started writing this article, the students below were being praised for raising $100,000 in less than two weeks. As I sit here ready to publish this, a day later, they've raised over $162,000.
There's a great story out the last couple of days about a group of students from NYU who have crowd-sourced investment capital to develop an open source alternative to Facebook. This actually comes on the heels of a great article in Wired calling for an open source alternative to Facebook (funny how that works, right?).
So what's happened over the last couple of weeks, and how quickly can this game change?
Look no further than relatively recent history and the story of AOL to find out.
In the 90s, AOL was a powerhouse. I had an account on AOL going back to around 1989 when it was a Macintosh Gaming BBS and the company was known as Quantum. AOL was a great "sandbox" to play in, but anyone with a telnet window and access to the growing list of protocols outside of AOL (Anyone else remember Gopher?) could see the writing on the wall. When 1993 rolled around, I was a junior in college and a group over at NCSA released something called "Mosaic", all bets were off. The AOL deathwatch had begun.
AOL was a "walled garden". You wanted to send messages (email)? You did it on AOL. Wanted to participate in chats, download desktops or pictures? You did it on AOL. AOL reluctantly opened their system up to FTP, Gopher and a small list of TCP/IP based services, but by then it was too late. People had seen the World Wide Web and collectively, the members of AOL said, "what the hell am I doing here, when all this other shit is out there, and it's free?".
Well, the same thing is happening right now with Facebook. People (smart people) are realizing that having Facebook be the gatekeepers of all your personal information (and basically signing away permission for them to share it, sell it, etc as they see fit) is a fucked proposition. The internet is made up of open protocols and Facebook is being anything but. They call it "Open Graph", but Facebook's definition of "Open" is vastly different from the general population's definition of the word.
But this isn't the worst side of Facebook's master plan that's been inadvertently revealed over the last few weeks. Their plan to own all of your activity, then turn around and expose it, or worse, sell it to partners has raised alarm bells far and wide. I recently sat down with a friend who asked me to help her with her privacy settings on Facebook and she was visibly shaken when she realized that formerly private photos and photo albums had been exposed to (literally) "Everyone" without her say. Personal information, Networks, friends... all exposed and made available to anyone with internet access and a browser (in other words, like I said, literally everyone).
That's why recent movements in the area of open protocols and open source alternatives will absolutely take off and will absolutely have the same effect the "Internet" had on AOL. Facebook's a great idea, but their execution is flawed (AOL was a great idea, it just wasn't executed the right way, until it was way too late). Information flows freely, and people inherently want ownership over the content they create. We're in the infancy of Web 2.0 technologies & the idea of UGC (User Generated Content) but slowly the "Users" in that acronym are waking up to the idea that, "wait, I'm creating value for you, you're making money (as Kenny Powers is fond of saying, "A Shit-Ton of it") off of me, and not only am I getting nothing in return, but you own the content I'm uploading? Bulllllllllshit."
Again, nobody is saying that the idea of Facebook, Social Media, and User Generated Content are bad, just that current executions of the idea in practice leave consumers and users powerless, and that dynamic won't last long. Open source, open protocols of Facebook's basic sharing principle, built on a foundation of already existing technologies (RSS, Ajax, JS, CSS3, HTML5) will allow the people uploading and sharing to own and control their own information.
Of course, the interesting thing to watch will be how the Search Engines and the businesses who have made money off of the Shit-Ton of information being pushed out into the ether will react to users creating their own, personal "walled gardens" and being the gatekeepers of their own information and content.
I'm going to sit back, pop some popcorn, and enjoy watching that one unfold.
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