If you have been burnt by the decline of the organic reach of your Facebook pages, you may consider trying something different, although of course it's hard to replace a website that has become such an integral part of our lives.
Minds.com founder and CEO, Bill Ottman, believes nonetheless there's room for an alternative. "I think there's a hunger for a social network that respects freedom and privacy," he tells me in a Skype conversation, and is launching today the mobile app of Minds.com, to demonstrate just that.
The desktop version of the website has been around for roughly two years, gaining some decent traffic with almost no marketing and promotion: according to the founder, during that period the site received some 60 million visits and became one the top 15,000 websites in the US.
It also drew support from some notable experts and organizations, like the American media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff, Fight for the Future's campaign director Evan Greer, former EFF's executive director Lori Fena (who also seats in Minds.com board of advisors), Creative Commons and others.
From the privacy point of view, Minds protect users conversations through asymmetric encryption. "We have zero knowledge of the content of the messages on our platform because they are encrypted end-to-end and we do not have access to them ourselves. If an intelligence agency came to us and asked for conversations between the users, we couldn't give it to them," Ottman says.
But the real deal, the feature Ottman is betting on, is the fact that users will be able to get viral reach just for using the app. On Minds's app, everybody will have a wallet and will earn points for every action, from voting on objects to sharing, commenting on a friend's post, or uploading their own pictures and videos: and with these points they will be able to boost the content to new audiences.
"Say I earn 100 points for using the app for an hour: I can go to a photo or video I uploaded and boost views for that object, and for free. You can also pay for boosts. But we want to create a mechanism in which users are rewarded just for using the app and where privacy is protected," he tells me.
Will it be enough to make the app popular? Hard to say. The company says Minds already has over 30k users in private beta with a potential reach at launch of 30M the first week with the support of alternative media groups, like ExposingTheTruth, or AlternativeWorldNews.
Other open source social networking projects, like Diaspora, while commendable in themselves, failed so far to gain widespread adoption.
Ottman seems quite confident not to face the same destiny. "I think the being the fist open source mobile social networking app is going to increase adoption dramatically. Diaspora also is different from us: they don't have mobile, their website is very complicated and their messaging system is also not encrypted."
In pure YouTube style fashion, Minds.com will also give users the chance to monetize the video content on their 'channels' (basically their facebook page or profile) running pre-roll video ads, with a revenue sharing model - part of the money will go to the user, part to the platform. Other opportunities could arise from selling, on a subscription basis, the chance of creating one's own social network using the Minds.com framework and infrastructure.
"It's like WordPress, you give say, ten bucks a month, and you get your own website," Ottman says, "the ultimate plan is creating a social network of social networks, where everybody can have their own social network and their own app, and create that in just a few minutes. It will be all open source and people will be able to modify it and host it themselves, if they want."
But this is scheduled to launch later, in the summer; right now, Minds' staff is just focusing on mobile.
