more thoughts on the facebook exodus

Following on from my post yesterday about Facebook (which I almost, but gladly did not ultimately title "I don't know how to quit you") Tim Whitlock made an interesting conjecture: maybe Diaspora could facilitate the transition away from Facebook by acting as a half-way house of sorts, letting you keep one foot in the Facebook universe and another in your new Diaspora-facilitated exile community.

We still don't know what the hell Diaspora is going to be in the end (and I'll bet that the kids building it don't know yet either) so this might all be a fantasy. That hasn't stopped almost 4000 people from donating $140,000 to fund its creation. Whatever the hell it is.

On Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan postulated that Facebook's growth has dipped, which we could plausibly attribute to the current privacy flap. The best part of this post is that Sullivan tells us that he straight up asked Facebook to share how many users have cancelled their accounts recently, which is like asking the lobster you're boiling how the water is. Danny Sullivan: you're all right in my book.

Finally, Arrington argued today that this is MySpace's moment to strike back at Facebook - kind of how Chong Li threw lime in Van Damme's eyes at the end of Bloodsport, right? Right?

Comments

[James Crawford]

Bloodsport analogy is class. To see Jean Claude Van Damme stagger around like that, with a bleeding nose and a crazed look in his eye was was prophetic and emblematic of his later day 'problems'. Reminds me of Zuckerberg, sort of.

[Igor Schwarzmann]

Ferdnando, I've wrote something up on this matter aswell: http://www.wiredvanity.com/articles/59/we-need-better-browsers-not-better-social-networks

Thing is, I don't really think that Diaspora can actually fulfil the expectations that have been created with all the attention they are getting right now. It's not a healthy growth and those four guys - as good as they may be - are probably not prepared to deliver a product that will even nearly satisfy the expectations or be something that resembles "an open facebook".

That said, it is nice to see that people care that much and that so many are actually prepared to give away a bit of money just to see an alternative for facebook. Definitely a good sign for the openness of the web.

[Michael Cohn]

The judges should have suspected something when Van Damme punched thin air right after that, facing the wrong direction. The question is, can Zuckerberg do the trick with the brick? Or will the agents coming to bring him back to civilization succeed in tasing him before he can redeem his violated girlfriend and his hospitalized buddy?

[Fernando Rizo]

Igor, you raise some really interesting points in that post, thanks for the link. I don't disagree that we need better browsers, but I don't think that's mutually exclusive from our need for a social network that isn't in the hands of one private concern.