92 karma · joined October 20, 2012
You mention privacy as a key factor -- I agree, but rationally a free social network must encourage sharing to stock its shelves with user information to provide to advertisers. In the other direction, there's App.net which can afford to enforce privacy because its income depends only on membership fees. (Unfortunately, membership fees inhibit the network effect.)
So what would make Facebook better? A better photo-sharing experience? An Events system which could interface with external apps? Or, does it go deeper? More users, I think, are recognizing that Facebook shows their friends only at their best, and are struggling to compare their lives to the glorified lives of their friends. Will the next social network open the door to deeper sharing, as opposed to more sharing? (Path comes to mind here...)
Last semester several Comcast reps gave my class a presentation which included a summary of their media strategy, a demo of their new cable TV platform/cable box, and a Q&A section. Their new cable box (a small, black, ATV-like 'dumb' set-top box) is progressive: it has a modern UI, connects to the Xfinity cloud platform, and can be updated through software rather than hardware changes.
However, one student asked their VP of Media Acquisition a simple question: "Who is your biggest competitor?" His answer shocked us.
"Microsoft."
At the time (~March), he told us Comcast expected Microsoft to stage a coup to claim "input A," the consumer's primary content interface. Traditionally, consumers would have their cable boxes plugged into input A and their gaming consoles plugged into input B. Microsoft, he said, would attempt to take over input A by including a cable jack in the back of the Xbox and offering live TV alongside streaming/web browsing/apps/games.
Looks like he was spot on.
I've been casually learning Ruby over the past several months, and was inspired by Mailbox to hack together a very rough snooze feature independent of the app.[3] The Ruby app hooks into special Gmail labels and causes emails in those labels to 'resurface' to the Inbox if certain conditions (mostly timing, e.g. the 'Tomorrow' label resurfaces emails at 10AM the next day) are met. It will take some time to develop the snooze workflow, but I like the system so far. An independent snooze function also has the benefit of letting me continue to use Sparrow to manage my email on iOS.