AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales to create Facebook competitor? — MatthewBuckland.com

At a gathering of about 100 of some of South Africa’s top geeks on Tuesday night, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales revealed what he said were some of the “first screenshots” of his new project on search.

But the screenshot that Wales briefly showed us in the audience looked very much like a Facebook profile page, than a search page. In fact it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page.

Could this mean Wales is developing a social networking, Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?

Described as “Google’s worst nightmare”, Wales said the main “failing” of search engines out there like Google was that they were secretive about the way they ranked search results. In stark contrast to the Open Source movement, these search engines kept information about their algorithms and code close to their chest.

“It’s not a healthy thing that power is in the hands of a couple of companies… the information needs to be out there in the public and people involved,” he told the gathering in Johannesburg.