1. Google Trends are showing an increased interest in deleting Facebook accounts.
Google’s “Trends” site shows an interesting graph of people doing searches for “delete Facebook account”
(http://www.google.com/trends?q=delete+facebook+account)
What the graph is showing is that there are ten times as many searches for “delete Facebook Account” recently as there were in 2008. The rate has been rising through 2009 and is rising at a much steeper rate recently.
2. The Diaspora group is attracting a lot more money than they set out to raise
On Tuesday we blogged about the four New York college students who set out to raise $10,000 on the KickStarter site to pay for pizza and Mountain Dew over the summer while they write a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” that they are calling “Diaspora.”
We checked the KickStarter page for Diaspora then and wrote: “As of mid-afternoon today their web site said they’d raised $33,179 from 1027 backers. They had been seeking $10,000 to support themselves over the summer while they finished the project.” http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/nyu-students-building-open-source.html
Well, that was three days ago. Here is what the KickStarter page says for Diaspora today:
These guys only set out to get $10,000! They’re up to $142,104 and the number is climbing by the minute!
Facebook has 350 million subscribers, so, it’s not like Farmville is going to become a ghost town overnight and there won’t be anybody left to bring in the fall harvest. However, the data above is starting to point to a trend and should be Facebook’s wake-up call about the privacy issue.
Tom Kelchner