[sswilson]

Originally Posted by XNine

On the otherhand, perhaps it's time for someone with some good coding knowledge to make their own app/service much like instagram, without all the tomfoolery (I love that word).

Now, if only I didn't suck at programming.

Unfortunately, no matter how altruistic the original intentions are, at some point the business model is going to require that it somehow become profitable which leads right back to personal data being the only real commodity for these kinds of websites. Look at Wikipedia, how long do we seriously think it's going to be around based solely on a donation model? Hosting costs for a globally accessable service don't come free, and most folks aren't willing to pay for them.

Now, if somebody could come up with an easy-to-use social media style software package that could be bundled with a $5 - $10/month private hosting/bandwidth/domain subscription folks might be interested in keeping their private information free from corporate interests.