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.
Wha?
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.
Methinks a little perspective is in order here.
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.
But that's a lot of ifs.
Don't you mean the opposite?
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.
Comments here are as insane as the amount of money these guys collected.
Did you come up with that yourself ?
Here in Brazil it wasn't until last year that people started even knowing what Facebook/Myspace is.
The social rule around here is Orkut + MSN Messenger. Unfortunately it led to a wave of "@hotmail" emails, but that's another thing.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hyves.nl
says it all.
(on the other hand there may be some interesting technical ideas they would find useful - so perhaps from that perspective...)