This short piece by Laura Sydell talks about some common Facebook complaints and describes a startup social network which hopes to manage those issues better than Facebook does. The idea is creating a network that makes users feel less intimdated by information sharing and the possibility of social gaffes. This report points toward some pretty broad questions, like "Do people like themselves on Facebook?" and "What will come after Facebook?" and it made me wonder whether Facebook has been successful because of its social structure or because of reasons that don't really have to do with the way it's organized. When I think about new or competing social networks it seems like the primary challenge is reaching Facebook's critical mass, and without that critical mass, the issues of privacy and information sharing are kind of irrelevant.
(Also, the comments section for this story on the NPR site included this invocation against Facebook usage, presumably directed toward non-octopi: "LOP OFF THE TENTACLE!!")
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