EtonDigital » Quit Facebook Day http://www.etondigital.com Most of us have struggled with poorly designed websites that are hard to find and slow to access; sites that lack coherent internal navigation and contain links that lead nowhere. we audit, design, develop and improve web sites Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:03:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= Diaspora raises $200k as Facebook continues to attract criticism http://www.etondigital.com/diaspora-raises-200k-as-facebook-continues-to-attract-criticism/ http://www.etondigital.com/diaspora-raises-200k-as-facebook-continues-to-attract-criticism/#comments Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:25:32 +0000 Dejan Levi http://www.etondigital.com/?p=1107 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 …

]]> 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 quitters (somewhere in the region of 35k users), it seems that Facebook's bad press on publicity is coming at no small cost. Of course, a network will always lose some users with changes that it makes and indeed FB will not be too troubled by the numbers just yet, though I don't doubt they will be concerned about the negative image that all this is building.

Unsurprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg is having to answer a lot of questions on this issue - and his appearance at the All things digital conference in California yesterday is no exception (see some of our previous coverage of this event for more). Techcrunch has a decent write-up of Zuckerberg's particular handling of the privacy issues as well as links to some handy video highlights.

With news coming earlier in the week that former US president, George Bush (junior) is the latest high profile figure to join the network, there can now be little doubt that Facebook more and more represents a rather mature and mainstream social network, and one that is increasingly being geared towards serious commercialisation - which was much less the case 3 or 4 years ago.

I expect Zuckerberg and most of those at Facebook understand that a little bad press is simply the price that will be paid for the pretty significant changes which are required to make the network a real money-spinner. As his interview at the D8 conference (linked above) shows, there is a sense at Facebook that such complaints and objections are simply a bit of initial grumbling, and have no real power to seriously upset anything in the long run, though nonetheless I for one will be keeping a close eye on Diaspora as it develops - if only for the re-assurance of knowing there is a viable alternative if Facebook's privacy policy really starts to annoy - even more than it already does.

Dejan Levi

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