A social network billing itself as the "anti-Facebook" with regards to privacy issues could succeed. The only thing such a network would retain control of would be related to ads. Everything else would be encrypted and controlled by users.
Such a startup would have to operate like Craigslist. It would have traction because it's there to provide functionality for users, not to maximize profits.
Reddit-style ads would pay for cloud resources, with the ability to opt-out by paying for services directly. By reddit-style, I mean that the ads can be shared with your friend network and voted up or down.
Smartphones and the iPad could be used to implement such a network.
Well, I think what we really need a standard, bare bones open source platform that implements something rational, and several providers (they would have to be fairly large ones) so that there's competition. Social networking needs to be a utility, not a walled garden.
Now, one of these providers might be ad-supported, but I would gladly pay $10/month for ad-free Facebook if it was just like a hosting provider - no data crawling, no new features, basically it's the job of the people I'm paying to make sure I can back up my data and that others can access it subject to my privacy controls.
> Well, I think what we really need a standard, bare bones open source platform that implements something rational, and several providers (they would have to be fairly large ones) so that there's competition.
