<story><title>Distributed Facebook replacement Diaspora pledged 2x the funding it requested</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr#name</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jfornear</author><text>The eventual Facebook replacement will look nothing like Facebook in terms of functionality. I wouldn&apos;t give a penny to a startup/project that positioned themselves against Facebook like this. Any variation of an &quot;Open Facebook&quot; of some sort is bound to fail.&lt;p&gt;Facebook&apos;s real problem is not user backlash from their privacy shortcomings, but the future of social networking in general. Some visionary will beat them to the future while they are busy milking the status quo.&lt;p&gt;This is not visionary, sorry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inferno0069</author><text>There&apos;s a lot of things this project could do without replacing Facebook that I&apos;d still consider successful. Four people thinking hard about making social networking better than Facebook for a summer could help &quot;the eventual Facebook replacement&quot; be better than it otherwise would be, even if this project itself doesn&apos;t turn into that replacement.</text></comment>
<story><title>Distributed Facebook replacement Diaspora pledged 2x the funding it requested</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr#name</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jfornear</author><text>The eventual Facebook replacement will look nothing like Facebook in terms of functionality. I wouldn&apos;t give a penny to a startup/project that positioned themselves against Facebook like this. Any variation of an &quot;Open Facebook&quot; of some sort is bound to fail.&lt;p&gt;Facebook&apos;s real problem is not user backlash from their privacy shortcomings, but the future of social networking in general. Some visionary will beat them to the future while they are busy milking the status quo.&lt;p&gt;This is not visionary, sorry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mortenjorck</author><text>I agree wholeheartedly. If they can build a solid platform, though, that can set the stage for a genuine breakthrough.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d say the most important thing is to deal with the social flatland problem (which I explain here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://interuserface.net/2010/02/buzz-facebook-and-social-flatland/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://interuserface.net/2010/02/buzz-facebook-and-social-fl...&lt;/a&gt;), and then pretty much follow every suggestion Joey Tyson makes in this post: &lt;a href=&quot;http://theharmonyguy.com/2010/05/10/dont-simply-build-a-more-open-facebook-build-a-better-one/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://theharmonyguy.com/2010/05/10/dont-simply-build-a-more...&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;p&gt;If that kind of advancement can be built into a well-engineered product with good UX, then we might really be looking at something that could start siphoning a bit of market share from Facebook.</text></comment>