Social media run by Australian national broadcaster proposed to take on Facebook

Thanks for the link. 'Tis an excellent idea but my pessimism tells me that it'll never happen (but I hope I'm wrong). The reason is that Australia has a long, long history going back to the 1920s and earlier of stuffing up communications like few other countries have ever done, period! If Nobel Prizes were awarded for communications policy stuff-ups then Australia would have scooped the prize the better part of a century ago!

Where would you like to start? The NBN, stopping the introduction of FM ca 1946 by Murdoch's father, Keith, as it would have competed with his newspaper interests; or how about TV Channel 5A located in an international satellite band or TV Channels 3, 4 & 5 in the international FM Band (88-108MHz), or the way Telstra was sold off and that bits of it had to be bought back by government.

(The fact that the cable rights-of-way (the distribution network) was sold off WITH Telstra and later had to be bought back for the NBN; and, concomitantly, the necessary creation of duplicate networks by Optus, etc. (as a now-deregulated Telstra also owned the distribution network that included the copper network but also the far more valuable and more importantly and valuable street cableways/ducting), meant that the Australian public had to pay for all this duplication, which, depending on how one does the calculations, is somewhere between 20 and 60 billion dollars! This fuck-up is nothing other than a national disgrace that verges on treason but it's been covered up (as both sides of politics were complicit in the sale.)

...And that's just the starters, if I had time I'd list even more.