What, expect consistency from the likes of Twitter? Their new ad rules are guaranteed to upset people, and so far they have:
My instant review of Twitter's new business plan. (Scripting News)
The biggest difference between an open platform and a corporate-owned platform — he can change the rules after we've all invested. With an open platform, you know the rules when you start, and they can't be changed later.
Or, better to say the only practical way to change the rules is to do so in a parallel iteration of what you're already doing. But I suspect it's going to take multiple rounds of being screwed by the likes of FaceTwitTubeSite LLC before realize just how tough the tradeoffs really are. Your convenience or your privacy, you choose which one you wanna give up more of. (Nobody describes Facebook as a social ad platform, but maybe it would be more universally honest if we did.)
What I would like to see more of is substitutes for Twitter and Facebook that are built more along the model of the original iteration of LiveJournal. The one big restriction is how many people can join the service and use it, with expanded service capacity given to those who buy it. Or the Flickr model: a not-too-crippled basic tier of service (with no ads), and a totally unlocked for-pay version. (Although I suspect a good deal of Flickr's subsidies come from Yahoo! at this point, so that probably sinks them as a model for such things.)
The problem, of course, is that if such things only scale modestly well, then they're not businesses that present enough growth to be attractive. They're curiosities in the minds of most businesspeople, not the masters-of-the-universe that TwitTubeBook are.
Is it really impossible to want a web that isn't just one giant ad-rotation platform?
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What was it like back in the Usenet days? (I never participated...) That was free for those who had computer access, right? And there were no ads? But it was pure text-based?
I'm wondering, indeed, how much money it takes to offer a service capable of accommodating enough people so that people want to use it (no one wants to use a service that no one else is using; you need a critical mass and then some).
Is the idea of an open-source social networking site that no one would have to run it? I went and looked at Diaspora, but I didn't understand what I was looking at--just saw a front page (but then, I'm an Internet ignoramus). Facebook and the other corporate-run things make it possible for grandmothers and ten-year-olds to participate, whereas if you have to understand UNIX even a little, they won't be participating...and I'd say for a social-networking site to really work, it really needs that huge swath of society. I hate-hate-HATE the advertising, but I'm wondering how else to finance things.
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The USENET days were "mere anarchy". On the plus side, there was very little filtering. On the minus side, there was .... very little filtering. You either learned how to create a killfile real quick or you moved on to something moderated. When blogs and Web-based forums started springing up, USENET started falling behind -- for most people, the lack of moderation, good or bad, wasn't worth the hassle of becoming a one-man moderator. I enjoyed the camaraderie of those days, but I wouldn't willingly go back to that mess.
You have the problem of Diaspora* nailed: it's not something people are going to use unless someone can give it to them as easily as FB. And if they do, you can bet it's going to come at a premium, and the most typical way to achieve that premium is by sacrificing privacy for convenience via ads. I want to see what their plan for making it universally accessible is before I shrug in dismay, but so far they seem more interested in the technical side of things than the social side.
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