Starting Your Own Social Media Site For Increased Privacy

[Rael]

I was thinking this would be a great way to use social media, without having to be spied on by places like Facebook. You could create your one blogs, allow family and friends to sign up and make their own.

You could make it more private by having a members only section, and you could also use the domain you use to setup email addresses for everyone, so email is more private and you don't have to rely on Gmail and other email providers that spy on you.

Maybe others around here have done this and can offer ideas?

[gerryb]

I often muse I could have been a myspace or facebook billionaire..

This is basically what geocities/angelfire and like services, and later blogger etc. were back in the day.. All it took was for someone to create easy links/associations between them, and a common look and feel.

It won't work today because too much interaction occurs and people want a single stop.

An open source competitor would be nice, that could be federated. Every person/group could have their own server, and federate/share data with other servers... it would require a lot of co-ordination, and who would build it? Facebook continually improves and can provide service for free because it has customers that purchase your data..

[Rael]

I don't think it would necessarily compete with Facebook...my idea is more of an internet portal/social networking site for a small group of people.

[kpitcher]

My quick take from being in a number of startups - fighting against any established player without a clear differentiating factor is going to be a rough uphill battle. The only reason they're 'spying' on you is to make money with targeted advertising. Bandwidth costs money, social media with pictures and videos uses a lot of it. Heck Youtube lost money for years even after Google bought them because flashing ads on webpages earns you very little. Also email is inherently unsecure unless it's encrypted end to end. Even if the email webpage isn't snooped it's sent in clear text and bounces all around, you can just assume it's not private.

But if you can find a better user experience for groups, or a way to better secure a group experience, without adding cost then you may be an effective niche player.

[Rael]

I did a bit more looking and found there are several options for doing this. I'm going to post a few articles below.
There are three services I will post stuff about, Ning, Chatterbox, and Diaspora

[Rael]

Chattertree Is a Private Social Network for Families

If you love the idea of using social networking to unite your far flung relatives but aren't too excited about using a wide-open network like Facebook, Chattertree offers private and feature-rich social networks for families.

You'll find all the things you expect from a larger, Facebook-like social networking tool in Chattertree. Messaging, birthday alerts, group chat, photo and video sharing, and more. You can create rooms for various family members to gather in—like a room for all the kids to chat in or a room for planning the next family reunion. Chattertree even supports multi-feed video chat so up to six families can video chat at one time.

If you're looking for a way to keep up to date with a big family without the openness of Facebook and the accompanying privacy issues, Chattertree is a solid solution. Chattertree is a free service and requires a basic email registration for all participants. Have a preferred solution for setting up a private social network? We'd love to hear about it in the comments.

http://lifehacker.com/5576500/chattertree-is-a-private-facebook+like-social-network-for-families

[Rael]

Creating A Network Like Facebook, Only Private

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html
https://joindiaspora.com/
How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

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. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

“We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”

They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. “Maybe 2 or 3 percent of the money is from people we know,” said Max Salzberg, 22.

Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 — “four talented young nerds,” Mr. Salzberg says — all of whom met at New York University’s Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

The terms of the bargain people make with social networks — you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites — have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post. “When you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever,” Mr. Salzberg said. “The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy.”

The Diaspora* group was inspired to begin their project after hearing a talk by Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, who described the centralized social networks as “spying for free,” Mr. Salzberg said.

The four students met in a computer room at N.Y.U., and have spent nearly every waking minute there for months. They understand the appeal of social networks.

“Certainly, as nerds, we have nowhere else to go,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re big nerds.”

“My social life has definitely collapsed in favor of maintaining a decent GPA and doing this,” Mr. Sofaer said.

A teacher and digital media researcher at N.Y.U., Finn Brunton, said that their project — which does not involve giant rounds of venture capital financing before anyone writes a line of code — reflected “a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.”

And the demand for a social network that gives users control is strong, Mr. Brunton said. “Everyone I talk to about this says, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been waiting for someone to do something like that.’ ”

There have been at least two other attempts at decentralized networks, Mr. Brunton said, but he thought the Diaspora* group had a firmer plan. Its quick success in raising money, he said, showed the discontent over the state of privacy on the social sites. “We will have to see how widely this will be adopted by the non-nerds,” Mr. Brunton said. “But I don’t know a single person in the geek demographic who is not freaked out” by large social networks and cyber warehouses of information.

The Diaspora* crew has no doubts about the sprawling strengths and attractions of existing social networks, having gotten more than 2,000 followers of “joindiaspora” on Twitter in just a few weeks.

“So many people think it needs to exist,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re making it because we want to use it.”

[Rael]

Ning is an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks,[4][5][6] launched in October 2005.[3] Ning offers customers the ability to create a community website with a customized appearance and feel, feature sets such as photos, videos, forums and blogs, and the service layers in support for “Like”, integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo!.[7][8] Ning, Inc., the operating company, has its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.[9]

The service allows customers to charge for membership directly within their Ning Network.[10] Customers can also monetize by using services provided through partnerships established by Ning, and adding display advertisements,[11] such as Google AdSense, to their Ning Network.

There are over 90,000 (as of June 2011) social websites, known as Ning Networks, running on the Ning Platform.[12][13] Ning offers 3 plans to its customers: Mini, Plus and Pro.[14] The plans are offered with varying feature offerings and range in price so that customers can choose a plan that best fits the goal for their community.[15] Once a plan is chosen, a customer can change it to another plan at any time.[16] As of June 2011, Ning has 65 million monthly unique visitors globally on its platform.[17]

Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. Ning is Andreessen's third company (after Netscape and Opsware).

On September 21, 2011, the company announced its merger with Glam Media.

[Rael]

bump