People fed up with Facebook will have yet another privacy-oriented social network which they’ll be able to join soon. The new offering, Openbook, is set to begin a KickStarter campaign on Tuesday and is already gaining support from experts such as Philip Zimmermann, the creator of PGP encryption, and Jaya Baloo, the chief information security officer at the Dutch telecoms company KPN Telecom.
Openbook is hoping to seize on the recent headlines surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. It said the website will not serve ads or track users as they use the site; instead it plans to launch a marketplace and take a cut of the transactions. Openbook isn’t the first privacy-oriented social network, we’ve seen Diaspora*, Friendica, and Mastodon among others which have tried to compete but have largely failed because people’s important contacts don’t use the services.
While many of those other services failed because moving over was difficult, Openbook will make it easy to move to its service. On its website it says:
“Just drag-and-drop your old social media archive into Openbook and import all your photos, videos, chats and more!”
The network will also appeal to those who feel like social media is too addictive. One of the key selling points of Openbook, according to The Telegraph, is that it will reduce the number of notifications that it shows to users as opposed to Facebook.
If the project seems interesting to you, be sure to find them on KickStarter in about 12 hours where you'll be able to back the project and receive t-shirts, mugs, and early access to the website.
Let us know in the comments whether you'll given Openbook a go when it's launched or whether you think it will fall flat like services that have gone before it.
Source: The Telegraph (Yahoo News)
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