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Decentralized social networks

Diaspora is a concept at this stage, but is based on these important concepts (from the video): “We don’t need to hand our messages [and relationships] to a hub. We can talk directly to each other”…”Sharing and privacy are not mutually exclusive”. Good points, but the big lesson of Facebook (and other projects that centralized previously decentralized functionality – i.e. Microsoft Office) is that ease of use trumps all, including privacy and ideals.

One Comment

  1. Tom Hoffman wrote:

    I think you’re jumping a layer about the specific relationship between ease of use, centralization and *especially* network effects. Facebook and Office aren’t really particularly easy to use overall, and they face no significant threat from competitors based on *ease of use*.

    Friday, May 7, 2010 at 12:41 pm | Permalink