This seems like a great opportunity for Google to "donate" some senior talent to the project, blow this up into a fully functioning platform (optionally backed up on Google's servers), and one-punch KO Facebook.
A bunch of geeks living in the echo chamber are pissed about a privacy issue, so they all cruise over to a geeky website, and toss in $20 of their geek-inflated disposable income, to a vaporware project whose popularity is mostly due to politics. Meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, ten million people logged in to Facebook.
Exactly. All this amounts to at this stage is a signal to facebook. A powerful signal, absolutely. But not by any stretch of the imagination a threat.
If they deliver somewhere in the fall and if it starts to draw significant traffic and if they don't have a big security breach themselves, and if there is no falling out between the four founders then they might be a contender.
No I don't. Not many people care about there privacy (otherwise facebook would have been bust). And even if they had pledged 200% or 300% that would have been enough to send a strong signal but 1088% of pledging is just not right.
There could have been so much more done with the other 80k. So many other things need money.
I don't know if it is not 'right', the signal function would have been just as strong if they would have set their original goal at $100K and people would have sent them that much $.
In some ways the $amount is a value that collapses a number of underlying elements to a single number, the amount of frustration around facebook privacy, the people that simply wish these kids luck and there are a number of people that hate facebook enough to put up a substantial amount of $.
Which portion of that $100K ($109K already, $4500 per hour right now) comes from the 'signal' portion is hard to tell.
I really doubt it would be that easy to KO Facebook. Remember Orkut? Google is great at a lot of things, but building online communities is not one of them. Also, as has been pointed out in other discussions: most Facebook users don't care and aren't going to leave unless there's a compelling reason. A lot of their photos are already locked into Facebook -- it's going to take a lot to show them a greener pasture, and I doubt "better privacy" is going to be one of them.
Google provides for consumers. From the spec of this project it is an interesting idea - but I don't think it will be a consumer project/site/resource like Facebook is (i.e. it won't pass the "dumb blonde" test).
(on the other hand there may be some interesting technical ideas they would find useful - so perhaps from that perspective...)
