Is It Possible to Build an Alternative to Facebook?

When some of the privacy issues surrounding Facebook blew up this spring, the Diaspora Project probably received the most publicity as a group interested in building an alternative to the social media giant. The brainchild of four NYU students, Diaspora aims to be a distributed, open-source social network. Publicity that the group received (Justmeans covered them here and here) was a fundamental part of the reason why they were quickly able to crowdfund their project. To date, Diaspora has received over $200,000 in funding donations.

But there have been a lot of criticisms of Diaspora, and even though the project exceeded its initial funding goal by 2000% indicating a groundswell of interest in the project, many people are skeptical that the Diaspora Project can create a viable product.

In part, that's because there have been alternatives to Facebook for quite some time. These include the "mainstream" social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace, but they also include several along the lines of Diaspora's project: free, distributed, and open-source. If these alternatives haven't picked up more widespread adoption, naysayers point out, what makes anyone think that Diaspora will?

One alternative is OneSocialWeb. OneSocialWeb seeks to create a standardized language so that different social network tools can be bridged and so that people's connections are not restricted by the platforms they choose to utilize.

Another alternative is Appleseed. Appleseed also seeks to support open standards. Appleseed is a social networking software that is decentralized and open source, with a beta version currently available for testing. Using the software, anyone can setup their own social networking site.

Of course, one of the most compelling reasons that people give for staying on Facebook -- even though they find themselves irritated by Farmville-related status updates and even though they worry about privacy and safety issues -- is that their friends are there. As long as your friends and your network remain on Facebook, it's likely you'll stay there too.

But this isn't an inevitability. As someone who remembers dialing into BBS forums and going into AOL chatrooms, I can assure you: social network services come and go. And while neither Diaspora nor OneSocialWeb nor Appleseed rival Facebook now, it's hard to say where we will be networking in the future. Nevertheless these projects all point to a future where social networking is more open.