• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 14, 2010

As Facebook continues to struggle with privacy issues in its continuing effort to make the site a profitable advertising medium, it might seem safe to conclude that it has carte blanche: after all, it's the biggest, most popular social network in the world, so it appears to wield an almost monopolistic power in the social space.

But this would be an incorrect and dangerous assumption. While it's true it enjoys a certain scale, and therefore a certain momentum that other networks lack, Facebook could plausibly de-throned by some competitor that does what it does better, and without alienating its users. Just look what Facebook did to MySpace; it's all too easy to imagine the shoe on the other foot.

Facebook would do well to watch its back, as new social networks that are explicitly or implicitly positioned as alternatives to Facebook are already appearing in the same hotbed of social media innovation that give birth to Facebook -- college campuses.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that four undergrads at NYU have started a new social network site called "Diaspora," a "more secure, personalized" network which gives users more control in what information they share about themselves. On its Web site Diaspora is billed as a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network." Meanwhile a separate article in the New York Times says Diaspora has raised over $100,000 in startup funding from over 2,500 backers through an online crowd-source fundraising site, Kickstarter.

Diaspora also makes a point of leaving its code open for other programmers to introduce their own features, innovations, and variants. Users can also "set up their own personal servers" and "create their own hubs."