Lessons from Facebook

Even though Facebook users are annoyed with the corporate changes, they are unlikely to leave Facebook. It should still have a strong presence in the SNS market a couple of decades from now. But there should be no expectation that Facebook—or any other SNS—could ever dominate this market again. SNS users are going to have different needs and Facebook cannot cater to all these groups. For example, FB is no longer catering to non-profit groups to get their message to their supporters.

But our annoyance when Facebook enhanced its advertising and data mining give us a clue on how to build a new and appealing SNS. In fact, one upstart SNS—ELLO—is promising us never to employ these two revenue generating tools.

Click here to learn more about ELLO.

I say there is a deeper reason for our annoyance: we Facebook users weren't given a choice when our preferred SNS took us in a direction we did not want it to go. We made a time and emotional investment into Facebook, and Facebook disappointed us. So we need to ask ourselves:

• Could we not build an SNS where we members make the decisions on advertising and data mining?
• Could we not build an SNS where we give our favorite non-profit organizations (and other organizations) the ability to get their messages to us at no cost; i.e. we choose what messages we want to see? In other words, there will be no filtered posts with Consensus.
• Are not these two directives working in concert with each other to create an innovative and wonderful SNS atmosphere that is also for the betterment of the world?

Consensus is the answer.