Hey social web, a little privacy?

Imagine being able to share conversations, pictures, links or movies on your chosen social network, safe in the knowledge that your information isn’t going to be passed along or sold to some third-party you know nothing about or that there aren’t going to be massive security holes that reveal your secrets to the entire Internet, or that your privacy settings aren’t changed indiscriminately . Sound good? Then read on.

Not everyone cares about privacy. But I for one do, and if you’ve got this far then clearly you do too. I’m concerned about Facebook’s new Like feature and its potential to detect websites I visit that carry it. I’m concerned about security holes and I’m concerned about political affiliations of social network owners. Call me paranoid but I believe privacy is a right, not a feature. And certain networks are constantly eroding privacy. I want privacy, yet I also love to connect with other people over the wonderful medium that is the web. These two things should be compatible, but right now it seems like they simply aren’t.

What social networks do is provide a virtual place, an infrastructure and a way for you to interact with your friends when you’re not physically near them. Any public social place, be it a social network, a park, a restaurant or a bar needs to be maintained, kept tidy and clean, repairs need to be made etc. Similarly, any social network has hosting costs, moderation, localisation and developers, designers and CEOs to feed. For parks they are paid for by taxpayers as a common good. For bars they are paid for through the sale of conversation-enhancing things such as booze and food. But online social networks have been grappling with ways to make money out of this for while now. They are finally beginning to face up to the fact that they are going to make money mostly from advertising, of varying levels of interruption. Most folk don’t mind advertising, providing it’s relevant, timely and appealing. However, the networks are finding they need to dig deeper and deeper and share more and more of your data to maximise their clients’ media spend.

Enter private social networking

As far as I can see there are just 2 ways that we can have private social networking. The first is that people are required to pay to use the space. Strictly speaking, users are currently paying for social networking, only instead of exchanging money, we are giving up our attention data and our attention to paid media i.e. ads. However, as a money-paid approach, it simply doesn’t seem realistic for this to get off the ground. The second way, which I want to discuss in more detail is the concept of a ‘distributed social network’. In essence, users pay for the network by being the network. To use the network you simply need to provide some input in the form of computational power. This would use P2P technology similar to Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent or even Skype.

There have been attempts in this area, namely Safebook, Elgg, OneSocialWeb and Krawler[x]. However, the only project here that seems to have got some traction is elgg.org, though Elgg isn’t distributed, making it really just an opensource social networking framework. This is still potentially useful but not a distributed client that is inherently private.

Then there’s Diaspora.

Diaspora is a “… privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”. It’s put together by a young bunch of NYU students. This isn’t something that investors would fall over themselves to get into. As evidence, consider the fact that, to date, this hasn’t been mentioned once by Techcrunch, despite the fact that the public has just seen fit to donate $33k to the venture on Kickstarter. That’s 3x more than they asked for in just 1/3 of the time they needed. There is serious demand for this. From an investors perspective, the only interesting thing might be in selling some form of hosting and support services to seeds. However, the approach is inherently and entirely non-commercial.

The main challenge for a distributed social network is really in getting anyone to use it once it’s built. But with the current backlash against certain social networks, the timing could be right and might explain the huge support this is garnering.

This kind of P2P distributed network defines disruption. Just take a look at how filesharing has destabalised the music industry. Private and distributed social networking is as disruptive to the models of Facebook, Twitter and even Google as they themselves were to The Wall St. Journal, USA Today or MTV.