Posts Tagged ‘Mark Zuckerberg’

Four New York University students have raised over $200k to launch their privacy-conscious social network, Diaspora, intended as an alternative to Facebook for those becoming increasingly unhappy with the latter’s privacy policies. While it still very early days for Diaspora (they’re unlikely to overtake Facebook’s 500 million user mark any time soon), there can be no question that there certainly is a viable niche in the social network market for such a network as Diaspora – as their remarkably effective fund-raising efforts have shown (initial targets were a paltry $10k, exceeded 20 times over by the actual sum raised).

Furthermore, with the ‘Quit Facebook Day’ (organised by disaffected former users of the network) on May 31st seemingly attracting a reasonable number of…

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Whether you’re enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon right now or enduring travel chaos across Europe as a result of the naughty volcano eruption, we all know there’s always time for a little bit of internet fun (time-wasting) in the way of gossip, news, a few Youtube clips etc… So, with that in mind, here are a couple of nice links for making the next few minutes of your life a bit more interesting (or diverting your mind from airport lounge desperation if you are one of those unlucky ones).

The first item comes courtesy of Techcrunch, who have posted some screenshots of a website designed by Mark Zuckerberg (aka Facebook creator/owner of course) back in 2001. You already know before you…

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Simon Garfield of the Guardian has this week interviewed Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and the result is a very interesting and detailed article on Guardian online. One of the most curious things to emerge from it is Zuckerberg’s frequent emphasis on ’sharing’, which he sees as Facebook’s most primary function. But Garfield is astute to highlight the importance of asking ourselves; just what exactly are we sharing, why, and for whose benefit?

The issue is not a new one in relation to FB; we all remember the disasterous and intrusive compulsory Beacon app, which monitored user spending habits and harvested the info for corporate clients. Understandably the user backlash was so swift and severe that FB quickly pulled the app –…

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There is a now pretty well known Facebook group entitled ‘If 10 million join Marc Zomberg will bring back the old Facebook‘ that I revisited the other day to check how user levels were doing. To my surprise the group has continued to grow and now has over 2.25 million members. There is more that’s strange about this than just the wierd mis-spelling of Zuckerberg’s name in the title (some users claim it is a joke, though I’m left slightly puzzled by it. I guess it does sound kinda silly…)

The odd thing is that there are over 400 such groups on Facebook at the moment, all taking the form of a petition to bring back the previous profile design (the…

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Prominent web commentator Seth Finkelstein is no fan of Wikipedia – and even less so of its founder Jimmy Wales. Finkelstein’s Infothought blog regularly features sharp criticisms of both, and while sometimes it can be perhaps overly negative about Wikipedia itself (he likens its functioning to that of a sweatshop, due to the ‘exploitation’ of unpaid contributors), I cannot help but feel that when he is critical of Wales he is sometimes right.

Wales is partially responsible for attracting some of criticisms leveled against him. The rather extravagant use of the Wikimedia expense account, that has been both widely documented and criticised (he once, unsuccessfully, attempted to charge a $1,300 dinner for four to the account) is one factor. It has long…

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