Despite Facebook's 500 million users, even tiny start-ups reckon they can do a better job.
First the phenomenon, then the book, next a movie, now the backlash and shortly the imitators. Facebook is everywhere, and much of what's being said and written about it is negative. That's stirring into life various pretenders to the social networking throne.
As if the constant headlines aren't enough, Hollywood's The Social Network, in cinemas around the country, has chimed in, revealing the phenomenon's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, as the archetypal geek - brainy but socially inept.
David Kirkpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect, based on interviews with Zuckerberg and other key Facebook figures, is a much more detailed telling of the story. It shows a young man - Zuckerberg is 26 - who is impressively clear about his objectives but disdainful of the privacy of his software's users.
The Herald website alone has run more than 1000 stories this year that mention Facebook. Lately, they've been on the subject of malicious use of the social network, the addition of new messaging features, privacy lapses and the non-committal answer from Zuckerberg to the question of when the company, valued in the tens of billions of dollars, might open its shares up to the public.
An old trick, but a good one, for gauging something's significance is to Google it: a search for "facebook" brings up more than 2.8 billion hits, a billion more than Google's own name.
If you doubt search engine results, consider that Facebook signed up its 500-millionth user a couple of months ago (more than 1.6 million of them Kiwis), and that the Queen is among them. Little wonder that wannabe Zuckerbergs are lining up. There's even a New Zealand one. Realstew.co.nz, which featured in this column in June, has ambitions to match Facebook, but with tighter security and a business plan involving revenue sharing among members. But Realstew has fewer than 5000 members, so Facebook's supremacy looks safe for now.
Path is another newcomer. If Facebook members compete to collect as many "friends" as they can, San Francisco-based Path goes for quality over quantity.
It limits to 50 the number of relationships members can have, a figure that evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has apparently found is at "the outer boundary of our personal networks".
Perhaps the most interesting challenger is Diaspora, started by Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer, students at New York University. When they said in April that they wanted to develop a "privacy-aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network", supporters fell over themselves to donate money to the cause.
The quartet, aged 19 to 22, set out to raise US$10,000 so they could work on Diaspora over the summer and ended up with more than US$200,000. Zuckerberg, oddly, was among the donors, though both parties are being coy about how much he gave.
Diaspora's point of difference is that, like file-sharing services such as Napster, it is peer-to-peer. That is the key to the greater privacy its developers are promising - all the intimate detail of a user's life will sit on their computer, and only contacts who have been provided with a code will be able to access it.
Communication between members' computers, or nodes, will be encrypted.
In an online video describing Diaspora's design rationale, Sofaer says: "We talk to each other, we don't need to hand our messages to a hub and have them handed to our friends. Our virtual lives should work the same way."
In September they released a first cut of the system, which was roundly criticised as full of security holes, but they weren't claiming it was foolproof yet.
They've given away little about progress since then.
As the response to their fundraising suggests, plenty of people are urging them on, among them Ryan Kohles, in Virginia, who started diasporaforum.org.
"Starting that site was my way of helping Diaspora succeed and I hope that when Diaspora is accepted by the masses, its success will help open the doors for other open-source projects," Kohles says.
One possible hiccup is ownership of the diaspora.com domain name, which belongs to Seattle-based company Marchex Sales. Spokesman Riccardo Soff says a number of people have approached him to buy it in the past few months, but it's not for sale for less than US$100,000.
Diaspora.co.nz isn't available either. Australian David Brophy says he registered the name in August as a speculative move. "We'll see what happens," says Brophy.
He may be disappointed - as a decentralised social network, the domain name could be immaterial to Diaspora's fate.
Information about Diaspora can be found at joindiaspora.com where, from Wednesday, visitors were being invited to sign up as possible early users. Those who've donated money go to the front of the line - that will include Zuckerberg.
Diaspora
* Its backers call it: "The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".
* What's the difference? Users would keep their personal information on a server they control, and decide who to share it with, rather than entrusting that information to someone else, such as Facebook.
* Status: Now under development by four New York university students.
* Launch date: Any day now (possibly).
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
