You want to hide but not from Facebook
Lately, Facebook has got a bit of a backslash. By reading different newsfeeds and forums, you might get the idea that most people leaving Facebook are doing it as a consequence of the Cambridge Analytica and other scandals.
I disagree. Yes, many people dislike some data collection techniques Facebook uses, but I don’t think that’s the main reason why they leave. The success of social networks like Snapchat or Whatsapp supports the idea that people like controlling who can read their messages, but in the context of not allowing other members of those networks to read them, not in the context of privacy from the company that runs the service!
In other words, people are not decreasing Facebook activity because they fear Zuckerberg might read them but because their father and grandmother might. Millennials, just as previous generations, loathe the idea of their parents peeking into their private social circles.
The tragedy is that as Facebook got bigger, its main functionality mutated to a very different thing. We can probably say with certainty that Harvard students no longer use Facebook mainly to find new girl/boyfriends. But some of them replaced that use case with Instagram or Whatsapp.
Discovery of a problem
Last summer I was up north of Spain, in Santander visiting a centenary home of some relatives and getting to know better part of the family history. As I listened the family history being passed from mouth to mouth to me for over two hundred years, and while looking at old pictures and portraits, I wondered how come there’s no easy choice to upload that information on the internet.
If a relative is famous enough, sure, you can open a Wikipedia page, but that’s not the normal case and even then there’s much you can’t, or even don’t want to make public.
Then there’s Facebook, but information in Facebook is quite unstructured, and you don’t even have the option to order the feed by time of publication. Yet I can understand that a successful social network cannot possibly have a rigid structure.
You can analyze other social networks in the search of the right place to upload the family history, yet I couldn’t find the right place. For example, in Instagram you can easily control who can see publications, yet you can’t publish text, and you can’t publish from the computer.
Life, or what happens while you plan it
As I started the journey to create my own social network I had to make the first compromises. A series of unfortunate circumstances delayed development. Two close relatives died, and I also searched a new job and decided to move to another country. When I finally got the time to actually create the first alpha I had to narrow the idea down to the minimum expression. That’s probably the right thing to do anyway!
Some rumblings
When I think about the MVP, this is my question: what’s the most immediate value I can provide? That’s what I should center on the MVP. I might be rambling but this is my train of thought.
First point: People like privacy, Snapchat, Instagram, and the Facebook exodus agree with that idea. So Lyfepedia will allow you to easily control who can see what you publish.
Reduce narcissism
A big problem with current social networks is that they fuel narcissism. People tend to only render a positive view of themselves, and readers get a very skewed version of them. And it actually empowers narcissists as they tend to publish as much as they can.
But real life social interactions don’t work like that. One-on-one interactions are limited by the fact that each day only has 24 hours. So how can we translate that into social networks?
My approach is simply not to allow people to talk about themselves. In Lyfepedia you cannot publish anything about yourself, only opinions about other people. You are 24h a day by yourself, but time with others has to be split between them, so there’s only so much you know about them. Also, at least normally people don’t become obsessed about others that easily.
Gossip world
So if only allow people to talk about other people… isn’t that the definition of gossip? Well, yes, but is that such a bad thing? I believe not. Actually, I believe that happens a lot in what I consider the most advanced social networks at this time: Whatsapp, Telegram and the rest of chat applications. Something important about those applications is that people feel those services are trustworthy because they feel they respect their privacy. When you gossip in a Whatsapp group, you know who is reading what. And as it happens that’s a very important thing for real social interactions!
But at the same time chat applications are not structured enough to be viable places for “collecting gossip”. There’s no centralized way to view all gossip about a certain person in Whatsapp, it’ll be scattered between different groups and one on one conversations.
It’s also noteworthy that gossip, and publishing the family history are not really incompatible. In both cases you can be talking about someone else, and you want to control who can see/read what. Also, I believe people love gossip, what if we had a somewhat structured way of collecting it, privately?
Preparing the launch
In the coming weeks I’ll be launching an invite only version of the Lyfepedia. It will allow me to see if I can generate some traction and test if it works. At first, it will be text only, and progressively I plan to add more features (like uploading pictures, video, recordings, maybe a mobile app, and many other possible improvements). You’ll be able to control who can see your publications, add tags, search in multiple ways, and see all the information the service collects on you (to be transparent and fair to you, the users). You will also be able to publish in a very public way so even non-logged users can see your publications.
I guess I’m just competing against Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Wikipedia…
Wish me good luck and head to https://lyfepedia.com to sign up for the beta!
