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Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that what "we" really want is to be able to mail, chat, play games with, send photos to and do other random stuff with our friends. What a subset of geeks want is an open architecture that with fine-grained privacy controls. The average person wants that about as much as they want to ensure that they have access to the source code of their operating system.

Social networking requires a critical mass; the critical piece of building an open architecture isn't writing the software and putting a site up, it's convincing enough people to join to make the experience worthwhile. And for that you need a better carrot than geek fodder.

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While users just want to do some simple things, they do care about the downsides and annoyances (that we know grow directly from lock-in). FB people already grumble about privacy, the meaningless of 'likes' and 'friends', the annoyance of all those third-party apps spamming friends of the player, etc. They're ready for change. They may not care about 'how', but they absolutely will care whether the next destination has those problems.

Sure, you need to wrap features into the protocol that will appeal to FB people. You should absolutely take the opportunity to solve some real problems. But the open architecture is crucial to protecting privacy. Without competition, no flavor-of-the-month network has incentive to put user needs ahead of its own wants.

Building that and attracting even a small fraction of Facebooks users would be next to impossible; harder than building another Google.

Only if you want to attract them away from Facebook. There's no need for that. All one has to provide is an alternative channel for communications that can effectively use Facebook as a directory, but provide private communications and updates under the user's control.

> What a subset of geeks want is an open architecture that with fine-grained privacy controls. The average person wants that about as much as they want to ensure that they have access to the source code of their operating system.

That's extremely condescending. Everyone I know wishes they had better control over their privacy on Facebook. The problem is that properly understanding and maintaining Facebook's current privacy controls would probably take several hours a month of analysis. That's intentional - Facebook is making the privacy controls too complex, and changing them too frequently for anyone to manage them properly.

> Everyone I know wishes they had better control over their privacy on Facebook.

Sure -- everyone you know. However, the average person has little or no interest in learning about and/or configuring privacy features.

But what average users want is so little. Done correctly, social networking could do what they want without such a heavy price to pay in terms of loss of privacy and control over personal information.

This is manifestly not just a geeky thing. Go read the news coverage of the last few major Facebook changes and you will see that the chorus of concerned people has been growing quite well. "It does what you like about Facebook, except only you control who sees your stuff" would be a simple sell to lots of people.

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