The system of one person or company doing something wrong and another making a promise to do things right is exactly why politics never improves. What is to stop the next person from turning evil too? A promise made by a person? Seriously?
If the new company were to come up with some decentralized architecture that would systemically prevent them from doing ads and would just establish an open protocol that anyone can use for a small licensing fee etc or some new way of making money, that would at least be something worth trying.
If the only difference is a promise that they won't do ads, hah. I don't know.
I really really want someone to build an open source decentralised peer to peer piece of software that does this. Something similar to bitcoin in that it's not controlled by any one person or system and anyone can join in. There are a lot of hurdles but I think it could be done and that's something I'd definitely put money towards.
For all the trashing e-mail gets on HN, it is a successful, and ubiquitous, decentralized peer to peer communications medium. It seems like that kind of thing stands little chance of taking off today where single-entity walled gardens are the norm.
I think Diaspora was crushed under its own weight. A few things I think that worked against them.
* Too much hype meant they had big shoes to fill before even writing a single line of code.
* Inexperienced team. I think they were all new college grads.
* Chicken and egg problem.
That being said, we're building federation (via OStatus) into OpenPhoto (it's already distributed). We're working with Mozilla and other yet to be announced partners. I don't think we have the chicken and egg problem.
The system of one person or company doing something wrong and another making a promise to do things right is exactly why politics never improves. What is to stop the next person from turning evil too? A promise made by a person? Seriously?
If the new company were to come up with some decentralized architecture that would systemically prevent them from doing ads and would just establish an open protocol that anyone can use for a small licensing fee etc or some new way of making money, that would at least be something worth trying.
If the only difference is a promise that they won't do ads, hah. I don't know.