What will the next big social networking site be?
In this day and age “what will the next big social networking site be” is the potential billion dollar question. First there was MySpace and then there was Facebook, so what will come next. I don’t think anyone can make that determination, however four college kids out of New York City think they may have the answer. They want to build a social networking system that is not solely owned by a company where all the data lives on the companies servers. They want to build a social network where you dictate what you want your social network to look like and it’s hosted on your own computer or server. The name of the project is diaspora. Who knows if this will be the name of the site or software, but for now it’s the project’s name. Below you’ll find more information about what “it” actually is.
Why do these guys want to take on the big boys you may ask? Well, it ties into my post earlier today about the site quitefacebookday.com. People want to control and own their own social networking information and don’t want companies controlling and dictating how you run your social network. For us in the porn industry this could be a great thing. Instead of worrying about people telling you what pictures you can and cannot upload you’ll have the choice and nobody will be able to tell you you can’t do it.
Their plan is to have something in working order by September of this year. They just raised $100K which they think will help them make the September milestone. I’m going to follow these guys and see if they can truly become “the next big social networking site” or sites I should say!
More info about the project
“Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.
Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data.
A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.”
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