Facebook are shortly going to announce that they have 500 million users which is pretty amazing but can they keep on growing a loyal and happy customer base?  There’s a few people not too happy at the moment with facebook because of privacy settings they have changed. They have mis-judged the power they have over their users and it could be a very costly mistake.  If you want to check out what changes you should make to protect your privacy check out the article in the Guardian.

I checked google trends to see how many people are searching for ‘delete facebook account’.  No surprise there, massive growth in this search over the last few weeks.  There were also surveys done regarding who is considering leaving facebook and in some cases up to 60% said they would consider leaving it.  I actually don’t think this will happen because Facebook will make an announcement soon that will roll back some changes regarding privacy but in a world where information spreads very fast a  number 1 player in a market could be black listed by the community very easily.

There’s a project started up in the US called Diaspora, pointed out to me by my good friend Dermot Daly, (picture of the team above) which claims to be a privacy aware, personally controlled distributed open source social network (launching soon!).  Their idea is that why would you register all your details with a third party social network and then they are making decisions about how they share out that data.  Why don’t you have your own piece of a server and on this server store all your information and then you make a decision who to share that with.  You own the data and you have full control over it.  The best of luck to the 4 people behind the project you may hear of it very soon.

So could Diaspora be the next Facebook?

Who knows will Diaspora be successful at this stage.  Maybe they’ll take some traffic from Facebook, maybe they will take huge traffic from Facebook maybe they will become the next Facebook!  My key message is that tools may come and go so when you’re thinking of social media don’t start thinking of the tools. Think of your business strategy and think of how online will support this strategy.  Then think of all the components of your online strategy and consider how social media fits into this.  When you figure out what to do and what content you are going to provide then think of what are the appropriate tools that will support this strategy.  Social media and social media tools will continue to change rapidly but your strategy should be longer term.

Of course this is just my opinion and I’d love to hear yours.   Do you think that Facebook’s presence will reduce in importance?  What do you think of a company like Facebook having such control over your own data?  What do you think of the Diaspora project?