We Need an Alternative to Facebook

It's time for a revolt against Facebook, writes Ryan Singel. Mark Zuckerberg may think privacy is an outdated concept, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to play along. As Singel puts it in Wired: "Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed."

Singel wants the "best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share," he says. "Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish." Of course, Facebook could head this off with "respectful" changes of its own. "But Facebook isn’t about respect—it’s about re-configuring the world’s notion of what’s public and private." (More Facebook stories.)