Once upon a time, Facebook was the elite social networking website. Anyone could hop onto MySpace, but only people enrolled in certain colleges could get on Facebook. These days, any fool with an email address can be on Facebook, and that, along with a lot of other issues involving the company’s privacy policies and heavy-handed administration, are causing people to leave Facebook in droves. As a result, many anti-Facebook social networking websites have opened up. Perhaps there’s an option that’ll allow you to close your Facebook account for good.
There are options for just about everyone. For those that miss Facebook’s closed-off college garden, there’s CollegeOnly, whose name should be self-explanatory. For those who want a more open-source experience, there’s Facebook’s main rival, Diaspora. There’s also the very interesting “social networking 3.0” site Hibe, which has yet to open.
When Facebook first started, I was one of the unlucky ones whose college wasn’t involved; after I graduated, Facebook expanded and I was locked out of my alma mater network because I no longer had a college-related email address. That soured me on Facebook from the beginning, and once all the privacy issues started to pop up, I was glad I’d never invested time or money into it.
Tags: Facebook, Anti-Facebook, Diaspora, CollegeOnly, anti-facebook options, social networking options that are not facebook, the antithesis of facebook, opposite facebook, privacy, social networks, Facebook rivals