After hearing all week how Facebook is all in on allowing Donald Trump to spew hatred and lies on their platform with no regulation or oversight and last week’s leaked audio of Zuckerberg dissing on Elizabeth Warren, it got me to thinking about the need for a viable alternative to Facebook.
The need is urgent. There have been several successful ‘Drop Facebook’ campaigns that only saw folks slowly migrating back to the platform due to their being no viable alternative.
It got me to thinking about what company could achieve something so quickly and also provide something that wasn’t insecure, didn’t abuse you for your personal data to be sold to the highest bidder and didn’t permit CT to run rampant on the platform. It was clear after only a few moments of thought that the answer was Apple.
They are well positioned for several reasons:
- They have the monetary and technical resources to pull it off
- They have the adoring fans already that likely migrate to using their service on their iPhones
- They have an advantage over Facebook in that they have the physical devices that could deeply integrate their platform making their apps and services possibly better than anything a 3rd party developer like Facebook could create
- They are trusted by folks to be a secure platform that won’t abuse or leak their personal data
After thinking on this and becoming more and more convinced it was a good and viable idea, like many of my ideas that make sense, after a google search I found this FastCompany story from earlier this year — If anyone can give us a real Facebook alternative, it’s Apple.