This just in courtesy of Thomas Cott (of You've Cott Mail). An interesting piece by Garrick Schmitt on the Advertising Age blog:
Until recently there has been no real alternative to Facebook as a social platform, but now a small band of upstarts and open source social technologies are beginning to challenge Facebook in the same manner that Firefox began to test Internet Explorer nearly six years ago.
To read the entire piece, click here. To check out Diaspora (The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network), click here.