Hi there.
I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the story, but in 2003 I started working on something called The Universal Face Book (or The Facebook for short) as part of a student club-run portal at Harvard called houseSYSTEM. Mark Zuckerberg signed up and we had dinner on January 8, 2004, three days before he bought the domain name thefacebook.com. The rest, as they say, is history. If you’re interested, I’ve posted some more background on Reddit, which you can find here: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/86xwgp/i_warned_mark_zuckerberg_about_the_cambridge/
houseSYSTEM’s Facebook never really took off the way that Mark’s did, and there are a variety of reasons for that. Mostly, I was a lot more concerned about privacy issues than Mark was. Starting almost immediately, I found myself on the defense as Mark’s product started growing, and in my view, borrowing features from what I had built. For a while, I tried to stay friendly, but I drew the line at a security issue that involved the exposure of exported friend lists, which didn’t get fixed nearly fast enough.
As one might imagine, the idea of building something new to compete with Facebook has occurred to me over the years. I thought about it in 2006, but there was essentially no demand for such a product, and I had no idea what to really build. Now, twelve years later, there is clearly demand. I more or less know what I’d want to build. The question is whether it’s even worth building.
There’s definitely some value in being able to share information with friends and family, and I have some ideas about ways to improve that process and keep it secure and reasonable. I even have some code written—actually, a lot of code, but not nearly enough to compete with a Valley tech company at scale. What I worry about is building another product that inevitably shifts toward use for trivial and potentially harmful purposes. Perhaps it’s not for anyone, myself included, to judge what constitutes “trivial” (I’m thinking cat videos), but certainly it is clear that social media has done a lot of harm in the past few years alone. I’d like to avoid contributing to that. Doing nothing is an option that satisfies that goal, but ceding the ground to Mark doesn’t seem like the best way to ensure things get better, either.
I’d be interested in any thoughts the community might have along these lines. Clearly many, many people are upset with Facebook and would prefer a new place to go run by a more responsible group of individuals, but is such a platform even possible to build responsibly at any kind of meaningful scale? Are there certain subtle differences that could give people better incentives to use technology responsibly and keep out those who refuse to? For this hypothetical product, assume a $9.99 per month cancel-anytime pricing scheme, similar to Netflix.
Thanks, and it would be great to hear what people have to say.
Aaron