Well, you could probably get 30,000 people from quitfacebookday.com as a start. And if you are a viable competitor to facebook, you would probably get some good, free media coverage. If your product is good I don't think it would be hard to get your first million users. There are plenty of people dissatisfied enough with facebook to at least give a competitor a try.

And the marketing would be easy, as facebook isn't branded as the nice guy, but as the jerk.

A couple of people at a time?

What I miss is some website where I can choose who gets to read what I write: this post is for everbody, this is only for my family, this is for my work mates, this is for the general public, this is for my brother.

The advantage of this would be that you could move groups over one at a time (since they would get some benefit from it, people would want to use it) and it is something facebook can't do and don't want to.

> What I miss is some website where I can choose who gets to read what I write: this post is for everbody, this is only for my family, this is for my work mates, this is for the general public, this is for my brother.

Try this site out: http://www.facebook.com/ - they have a nifty feature that does exactly that.

As I understand it, facebook applications can see your data and the data your friends share with you, so I don't think facebook has that feature.

If an application can see some data that wasn't shared with me, then I agree that's a pretty big problem. That an application I give access to see my data can see, well, my data, isn't a problem in my view.

http://imgur.com/dzMVN

What about this scenario:

(1) You share your birthday with a friend Bob.

(2) Your friend Bob installs a facebook game from the Sleazo Company.

(3) Sleazo Company now knows your birthday.

That's how I understand it works. Your friends can share your information with third-party facebook applications. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Once your information is in Bobs hands, what he does with it is out of your control. Even if we consider a network that doesn't allow apps, what if Bob downloads SleazoCo Birthday Reminder (comes build-in with your Bonzi Buddy) that scrapes your birthday from the site? At least Facebooks terms forbids app-producers to save anything about users for more than absolutely needed, and SleazoCo can theoretically be banned from making FB apps if caught in violation of this.

Unless we're willing to consider DRM for social networks, this won't change with Diaspora or any other kind of software that puts your birthday on Bobs computer in any kind of standardized format.

Have you read You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier? I think you might like it. There is an entire section devoted to exactly what you just said, and how facebook essentially "removes the individuality" from its users.

At the same time he makes huge mental leaps that I completely disagree with (he said basically the same thing about open source/open culture) but there are several gems in the book.