The monolithic power of any one, great organisation is always a little scary - especially when it’s essential monopoly renders competition not just potentially irrelevant but practically impossible.
Such is the position of Facebook - the social media application we love to hate but can’t seem to live without.
It’s impossible to deny that it is a powerful tool and compared to the eye-melting chaos of Myspace pages (I deleted mine with a certain sense of satisfaction last month) it’s elegant blue and white aesthetic is both easy-to-use and intuitive. That is if you discount the obscene amount of applications, add-ons and other confusing extras.
However somehow we have come to accept things in the virtual world we would seriously question if they were mirrored in the physical - check out these truly shocking stats (or watch them on a video on socialnomics):
- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
- Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
- 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook
- 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
No one company should have such a stranglehold, but social media is dependent on connections, and each platform is, essentially, an island - useless without the critical mass of fellow users. With this in mind it looks as if we’re moving towards a situation where it will be almost impossible to establish an alternative system and therefore very difficult to hold Facebook to account for its future decisions regarding privacy, data and advertising.
With the recent furore surrounding Facebook’s recent decision to allow non-Facebook websites to post personal views of Facebook users without consent this should be something we are beginning to worry about.
At SKV I’m regularly engaging via many different social media platforms, but - the rise of Twitter and LinkedIn aside - it has been noticeable that the playing field has been narrowing. I can’t deny that this makes it easier to talk to larger amounts of people in one place but the thought of all that power in the hands of one organisation makes me nervous.
The Diaspora Boys
In the light of all this it’s heartening to hear that communities of programmers are trying to create something which puts users back in control of their data. Four N.Y.U students recently made news when they raised more than $100,000 to create Facebook alternative ‘Diaspora‘ operating under the principle that the user owns everything uploaded to their ’seed’ (profile).
I for one am looking forward to seeing what they create.
(Statistics acquired from http://www.wirefresh.com/Facebook-accounts-for-50-of-uk-mobile-internet-traffic/)
Tags: Diaspora, Facebook, Myspace, privacy, SKV, social media
