"Altly" - An alternative to Facebook

When it comes to entreprenuership Dmitry Shapiro won’t give up that easily. He is an aggressive and exuberant entreprenuer who is still trying hard to make an impression in the tech world. His last 2 startups Veoh (a video-streaming company got eaten by YouTube) and Akonix (instant messaging company got acquired by Quest) were not able to sustain long. Dmitry joined MySpace Music and its CTO and it seems now he has left that job as well. He is recently is news for his latest venture which is called “Altly”.

I got the chance to visit the site of Altly and I came to know that this time Dmitry is planning something big. Something which most of the tech gurus wanted to do for a long time now but does not have the courage to pull it off. So what exactly is Altly all about? Well the sole purpose of Altly is to make something better and bigger than Facebook. You read it right, Dimitry is all set to challenge Facebook and now the fight is out there in the open. This has been an interesting development as far as the competition with Facebook is concerned.

This is not for the first time that someone is trying to take on Facebook. Diaspora which attempted to do the same is out there but slowly and gradually it is on the verge of losing out to Facebook. Will Altly be able to compete with Facebook? Well it is all upto to Dimitry and his team which is working very hard in order to make that happen. The team at Altly even convinced some investors and it seems they have raised around $1 million for this venture. Dimitry wrote a very convincing and descriptive blog on the site of Altly explaining why we need Altly and how this social networking site will challenge Facebook and overcome someone of the shady features of the social giant. It is very interesting to know that someone like Dimitry is damn serious in shaking the pillars of Facebook.

There is one very intersting point which Dimitry made in his blog while explaining the reason why we need an alternative to Facebook and to me this sounds convincing enough.
"There are NO serious alternatives at this time. For every Coke there is a Pepsi, for every Ford there is a Chevy, for every PC there is a Mac and for every Facebook there is…. a void! Facebook has such overwhelming power that practically no one believes that trying to build an alternative is possible."

Well good luck to Altly and Dimitry. Competition is always good and it seems Facebook needs that if it wants to enhance and reshape its social networking business model.