Facebook is bubbling at a value of $60 billion.
Zuckerberg who I think most people will agree is a douche, owns 25% of the company.
Facebook has no competitive advantage other than users don't see a reason to move to any other network.
Goldman Sachs, some seedy russian investment house and plenty of other nefarious characters have stakes in facebook.
YOUR input, their reward.
When they have pumped the share price high enough, they will offload the shares on to average joe, mostly through mutal funds/pension trusts. We can stop them.
Create a community owned social network. No ads, no sale of private information.
Yes, this part has been attempted before, infact some people attempted to pay people to use their social network.
But I have one extra ingredient that may allow this venture to succeed when others haven't. Financing from an internet giant.
Google is very wary of Facebook's ambitions, and it's share of user attention while they are online. When people are using FB, they aren't searching. And who knows when FB decide to enter the search arena.
Google tried to compete with Orkut but failed and trying again with Google.me or Google circles.
What they fail to understand is that they do not have to win, all they need is for FB to lose.
Financing and cheap ads should be donated to a third party coop. They can then take the FB monsters down.
Each user will get a share in the network. If the users ever commercialise the network, they can receive dividends.
They can vote on features and policy. A true democracy. And best thing of all is they own their data and nobody elses profits from their efforts.
I had this thought a month or so back and thought it would be best to somehow get financing from Google secretly and acheive this. But I'm involved with other things, so working my way into Google and presenting it to them is not feasible. Also believe it's best to keep things pure and transparent from the outset.
Google remember, FB only has to lose for you to keep your position as top dog. In return for your financing, I'm sure the users will agree not to encroach on your territory.
again guys, this has just been a thought, but there's no reason why this flame cannot grow into a raging fire.
TSR, get this thread going, how amazing would it be if TSR were responsible for the next big thing on the web and the destruction of $60,000,000,000 of undeserved and/or illgotten paper wealth. Karma is a bittch so 'don't be evil' as Google used to say.
peace