Saturday, May 15, 2010

Death to Facebook?

"A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business." As the NYT article makes clear, they have already raised on the internet more than twice the money they would need to design the open-source software intended to decentralize social networking. In their nerdy naïveté, they wanted to do this without promising big returns to venture capitalists. They should learn from the people who launched that web site last November allowing kids to make anonymously disparaging comments and ask embarrassing questions of each other. They knew their ECO 101 and had amassed 2.5 million dollars in venture capital before starting work on their similarly creative project.