HAS FACEBOOK HAD IT'S DAY ?

So much has been written about Facebook's problems with privacy that it's hard to know where to start. The gist is that Facebook committed great blunders and the public spanking began. Reports suggest its user retention might have dropped somewhere between 25 % and 48 % due to fears that not a single morsel of our privacy on Facebook is protected.
With all of the
talk over privacy concerns on Facebook, it doesn’t come as a huge shock that a new social network would step up to try enter the market built around the idea of greater privacy controls. What is unusual about the story is that the site, which has yet to be built, isn’t going to venture capitalists for funding, but is instead turning to ordinary people.

Diaspora is being billed as an open social network that will give you complete control over your social interactions. Apparently each person will be in charge of their own encrypted node on the network, and you will have full control over what you choose to share. In light of the current controversies with Facebook, there is no doubt that this will certainly gain some people’s interest.

The fervor over this idea reach a fever pitch the other day when the project was profiled by The New York Times. The four men behind the idea had decided to use micro-funding site Kickstarter to try to raise $10,000 so that they could work on the project all summer. They reached that goal in just 12 days, and that is what got the attention of the newspaper. Since the profile, the donations have continued to roll in, and at the time of this writing they are probably mere hours away from hitting $100,000 with nearly three weeks to go

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The biggest issue is if this idea can catch on like Facebook or other social networks because it sounds like it will require quite a bit more work on the user’s part, but considering its focus on privacy, it looks like people want to at least try it.

Hey, did you know there are other, preexisting social networking sites? Oft-forgotten, these underdogs are witnessing dramatic spikes in site traffic. In the past month, Orkut.com saw a 63 % rise in traffic with over 1.2 million unique visitors. This is an almost 150 % increase over the last year.

Other sites aren't faring as well: Friendster dropped 5 %; Bebo.com dropped 4 %; and hi5.com, despite having more unique visitors than Orkut, still dropped.

Diaspora is just one of many other alternatives to Facebook starting to spring up that includes OneSocialWeb, Elgg and Appleseed.

Click here for more on Appleseed - > http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/theory/future.php