26 Jul Will diaspora* Ever Realistically Compete with Facebook?
Last week, global social giant Facebook passed the 500 million active member mark. That’s a lot of people. Stop and put it in context for a moment; there are now half a BILLION active Facebook profiles. There are only six billion people on the planet. When you think of it like that, Facebook’s achievement is mind-blowing.
Added to this, Facebook hardly ever has downtime, which in itself is remarkable. We take it for granted that Facebook will always be up and running, despite the traffic that 500 million people must generate. Twitter can’t even cope with 50 million. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder) said in a statement: “This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world. Now a lot more people have the opportunity to stay connected with the people they care about.”
That’s a carefully crafted PR statement if I ever I heard one, designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But the numbers and the platitudes do little to paper over the cracks of disillusionment that are increasingly commonplace when it comes to Facebook. The negative publicity the network has attracted over privacy may not, arguably, have done much damage at present (after all, 30,000 people leaving the site really is peanuts when compared to 500 million using it), but what it has done is spawned a potential competitor.
Among those in the digital world, diaspora* has been touted for several months as Facebook’s future competition. The concept is based around a “privacy aware, personally controlled, open source social network” – everything that Facebook isn’t. The project needed some $200,000 to get off the ground, a figure it achieved with minimal fuss in June. What I find particularly interesting is that a concept that has previously been very much under-the-radar of a mainstream audience gained a mention on BBC TV at the weekend via it’s ‘Click’ show.
The definition of a diaspora is: “the movement or migration of a group of people…away from an established or ancestral homeland”. I personally hope the project gets off the ground purely because of the incredibly apt and creative choice of name! But, assuming the network can get going, is it really feasible to expect 500 million people, or at least a great proportion of them, to ‘migrate from their Facebook homeland’ to diaspora*? Bebo and MySpace are both dying a slow and painful death as users have moved to Facebook, but is the social giant now so big that only a policy catastrophe can threaten it? Is it even possible for diaspora* to gain the critical mass it would need to become anything other than a curiosity? What are your thoughts?
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