Public/private Aus social networking site launches

That's fine

as long as its userbase is in the thousands, not the millions. As it progresses, one of two things will happen: 1) It will ultimately fail to attract an audience, thus not making enough to cover the costs of running it, and it will fold; or 2) It will continue to grow until it becomes just another Facebook.

By that I mean that as the userbase expands into the millions, so too the costs of running the site and providing technical support will escalate, and so the site will need to make money somehow to cover that. Then the investors and shareholders will want their pound of flesh, so even more money has to come in for that. The only two ways for a SN site to make money are: Charge a periodic subscription fee (which people won't pay when there are so-called "free" alternatives) or provide theso-called "free" alternative, funded by privacy invading advertising. The more privacy-invading, the better.

Assuming this site succeeds to become the next Facebook rival, we will see the same thing: they might have high ideals about privacy now, but when the bills start rolling in those ideals will collapse like the house of cards they are, and the same forces that turned Google and Facebook from genuine services into soulless privacy vampires will simply turn this lot into just another invasive ad-pushing time-waster.

So no thanks. Been there, done that, read the book, seen the movie, bought the T-shirt. I'm not riding that merry-go-round again.