Surfers spend many hours whiling away the hours on Facebook and other social media sites, checking out other peoples profiles, chatting to friends and playing games. It’s this audience that is targeted by internet marketing companies with strategically placed advertising that can be matched to the user by information held by the social media site. However, with such an gargantuan following, Facebook almost hold the monopoly over these advertisers so to see a credible group of people working on setting up a worthwhile rival can only be a good thing to drive down advertising costs.
Four New York students have managed to raise $200,000 to fund this alternative and promise to better handle the privacy issues that have dogged Facebook recently by making the user responsible for his own information. The team hope that by the end of the summer they should be ready to launch Diaspora with the ability for the user to store their own data and decide for themselves who it is made available to.
My guess is that Facebook see this project as an issue with Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, saying “It is likely that the biggest competitor for us is someone we haven’t heard of.” This comment coming after he contacted Diaspora and then went on to dismiss talk that Facebook were trying to make all information open to the public.
Those looking for internet marketing strategies might do well to hold fire for a few months and see what the world makes of the latest social media offering brought about by three computer scientists and a mathematician.
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