The other social
I was never a Facebook fan. I get the general point of the service to easily stay connected to friends and family. However maybe its because I’m not an overly social person, I never understood why so many people view the internet thru Facebook, or buy so heavily into the Facebook services. As a result I was more of a Twitter users.
I’ve preferred Twitter to Facebook because it had an open feeling. Something more noble where the service was ‘we the people.’ Slowly that feeling is melting away. Many of the geek thought leaders have started looking else where. One of the first attempts at replacing Twitter was identi.ca back in the Twitter #failwhale days. It never caught on for various reasons. Today we have two other choices app.net and Tent.
App.net made the first big splash with a unique funding method, ask your end users to fund you. App.net philosophy is pure it simple make the backbone for the developers to build off of and make the end user the consumer not the product. It is a pay to play platform which will keep many away. At the same time I think that will help the service scale and allow for developers to build unique and interesting services for the next few years. The Twitter like functionality (alpha) is just a quaint fundraising side show.
We also have Tent. However, unlike App.net, tent isn’t a platform, its a protocol for social networking. Not only that it is decentralized, which will ensure it stay open. Yet that brings upon it many problems such as long term interoperability. It isn’t a service nor is it a platform, but idea how social networking should function. I have high hope for the tent status app, tent.is and hope it takes off. I however feel it has many growing pains ahead, the potential user base already has ideas and expectations. The status app must either evolve meet those expectations or refine itself to show the user a better way.
Of course these are my quick thoughts and haven’t really spent much time looking App.net or Tent. I like what I see with Tent, so signed up with tent.is. And the tent github wiki has a nice page Explaining Tent.