Incliq was founded by Zach Nelson and calls itself "social networking that doesn't suck. I agree with them in general that the Facebook model of social networking is awful, but since there's more than one way to "not suck", lets have a look at their vision. Their view about what makes the typical social network so bad is twofold:
1) "social overload" - too much information from too many people you don't really know or care about and
2) middlemen - using a third party to store and transmit your information
Put simply, Incliq's goal is to minimize your social spam and eliminate the need for a third party
As they put it, the way Facebook is set up benefits Facebook, not you. You can't really organize the people you socialize with to control what info is available to them or from them. And everything you put on Facebook literally sits on Facebook servers for as long as they want. AND third party apps like Farmville also get access to all your data.
Incliq is set up so nothing of yours is ever transmitted to or stored on Incliq.com servers. You may ask, if my pics and messages don't exist on their servers, whose servers does it exist on? Their answer is it doesn't exist on any one group's servers. Instead, in a way it would exist - encrypted - on the computers and connections of numerous people you connect to. They expect you'll agree - and its hard not to - that this is preferable to having it in the possession of a "shadowy corporation" who sells it to whomever they want.
Instead, your info flows across a "mesh" to the people you want to share with. I'm not a computer scientist, but I'll try to briefly explain what this "mesh" is.
A mesh network is the opposite of a traditional network. In a traditional network, a bunch of people log in to a central connection and can interact through it. Imagine if there's one cell phone tower or internet provider in your town - if you call, text or IM with someone, you are connecting through the central hub. In a mesh, everyone is a hub and there is no 'center'.
As different people link up, they each serve as another path through which connections can travel. If any one drops out, there are plenty more connections through which you can send info and interact with people. Ideally, you can trust the other people-hubs in the mesh because you know them. However there is also data encryption that would most likely keep all but the very curious and very computer-literate from thinking twice about "peeking" in on you.
The Good:
I'm very happy with the second core idea behind Incliq - organizing your acquaintances. Like Hibe and 6d, Incliq gets that Facebook is a disaster as tool for interacting with the different types of people in your life. Incliq allows you to organize your friends, family, acquaintances, etc into different groups or 'cliqs'. They don't go into much detail on just how it will work, but one imagines its a set of lists of people, organized around various key concepts or aspects of your life or personality. I look forward to hearing more about how they will impliment this functionality.
The Bad:
I agree and am very happy that their system would ease social overload and basically stop the sale of your data for advertising. However, I'm concerned that certain 'cliqs',especially those composed of people I know or trust less, would be highly worrisome in terms of privacy and security. Perhaps if I knew more about the security I wouldn't be as worried. But given what I understand about "mesh", it seems like the possibilities for viruses, hackers, and just plain mischief is there. I could see this particularly being a problem for the high school set, where actual cliqs can be pretty rough on eachother and their members. It could also be a problem for groups of coworkers for similar problems.
One last thing, though its less important - I'm not thrilled with the name "Incliq". 'Clique' can have a negative connotation and coupling it with "in"seems to highten the negative aspects of the term. But that's just me.
Hopefully it won't do damage to the network because there's a lot of good here and I wish them success. It will be interesting to see how they stack up against Hibe, 6d and Diaspora. At the very least, I'm certain they'll be a much better option than Facebook.
The basic idea is that if you start a conversation on, e.g., Twitter, whether a friend or someone you just met, you can move it to secretsocial and keep it going for up to one week in complete privacy. Once you end the conversation, nothing is saved on their servers. Since you are talking on their servers, once its gone its pretty much gone. (This is an interesting alternative to Incliq's embrace of mesh networks to secure privacy.)
I think the benefits to this are mostly clear. However, I do have some worries, and a few I think are pretty serious. The question is, does their belief that "social is not another word for public" lead them to go too far? I totally agree with them in theory, but just what have they created here?
Is SecretSocial just a safer way to flirt and hook up? I mean, are people going to use this to conduct business? I keep thinking about The Wire and how hard it is for police to get wires on cell phones (sometimes this is a good thing). Well, with SecretSocial, it would simply be impossible to tap in to a criminal operation's private communications. And there would be no text messaging transcripts to look at either. So it seems that this service would be *ideal* for people who actively wanted to do things like cheat or organize illegal activities.
That alone is definitely not a reason to kill SecretSocial or even for you to not use it for normal purposes. Or even for naughty-but-not-criminal purposes. But its something to think about. The funny thing is, SecretSocial really seems to be a bit of a 'bonus' or extra feature to the company's bread and butter, Civiguard, which is supposed to help organizations such as municipal police departments or first responders organize their assets.
Conclusion
1. Hibe
2. 6d
3. Incliq
4. SecretSocial
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