Should Apple Create a Social Media Network?

When Mark Zuckerberg was grilled past congressional leaders earlier this month, one thing was clear. With 98 percent of Facebook's revenue coming from ads, it can only survive by digging deeper into users' profiles to serve upward contextual ads.

Opinions This has prompted privacy-conscious web users to look for alternative social networks. Nearly are niche sites; Apple is probably the only big player that could create this type of social network since information technology makes its money by selling products and not ads.

"We don't collect a lot of your data and understand every particular virtually your life. That'southward simply not the business that nosotros are in," Tim Cook told NPR recently.

He connected: "We practise recall that people desire u.s. to aid them proceed their lives private. We see that privacy is a fundamental human right that people have. We are going to do everything that nosotros can to help maintain that trust."

Given the problems Facebook is facing, perhaps it's time for Apple to create its ain secure individual social network (something a bit more robust than the now-defunct Ping, that is). Apple already has the backend in place to support this and could accuse a nominal monthly fee of a few dollars to cover the infrastructure back up needed to add together hundreds of millions of social networks users to its service/system.

I see web users benefiting from an Apple-hosted secure private network in a number of ways. First, without the need to scrape information for an ad network, people would feel more than free to share things. Second, hundreds of millions of people have provided their credit card data to Apple via the iTunes Store, which is a very large base of operations Apple could tap into for a secure social network. Third, this could entice many folks outside of the Apple ecosystem to join Apple tree's social network for the privacy alone and ditch Facebook completely.

Cook believes that an ad-free social network is the only way i could provide a truly secure social network. When asked during an MSNBC interview what he'd do if he were faced with the same situation every bit Mark Zuckerberg, Cook insisted he "wouldn't be in this situation." In response, Zuckerberg told Vocalisation that Melt's comments were "glib."

Will Apple get into the social game? I would non bet confronting information technology. At the very least, I imagine Apple tree execs have been discussing it. Cook conspicuously understands the value of an ad-gratis social network.

Nigh Tim Bajarin

Tim Bajarin

Tim Bajarin is recognized every bit one of the leading industry consultants, analysts, and futurists covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin has been with Creative Strategies since 1981 and has provided research to nigh of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple tree, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba, and numerous others. Mr. Bajarin is known as a concise, futuristic analyst, credited with predicting the desktop publishing revolution three years before it hit the market place, and identifying multimedia equally a major trend in written reports as early as 1984. He has authored major industry studies on PC, portable calculating, …