Should Apple Create a Social Media Network?

When Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by congressional leaders earlier this month, one thing was clear. With 98 percent of Facebook's revenue coming from ads, it can only survive by digging deeper into users' profiles to serve up contextual ads.

This has prompted privacy-conscious web users to look for alternative social networks. Most are niche sites; Apple is probably the only large player that could create this type of social network since it makes its money by selling products and not ads.

"We don't collect a lot of your data and understand every detail about your life. That's just not the business that we are in," Tim Cook told NPR recently.

He continued: "We do think that people want us to help them keep their lives private. We see that privacy is a fundamental human right that people have. We are going to do everything that we can to help maintain that trust."

Given the problems Facebook is facing, perhaps it's time for Apple to create its own secure private social network (something a bit more robust than the now-defunct Ping, that is). Apple already has the backend in place to support this and could charge a nominal monthly fee of a few dollars to cover the infrastructure support needed to add hundreds of millions of social networks users to its service/system.

I see web users benefiting from an Apple-hosted secure private network in a number of ways. First, without the need to scrape data for an ad network, people would feel more free to share things. Second, hundreds of millions of people have provided their credit card data to Apple via the iTunes Store, which is a very large base Apple could tap into for a secure social network. Third, this could entice many folks outside of the Apple ecosystem to join Apple's social network for the privacy alone and ditch Facebook completely.

Cook believes that an ad-free social network is the only way one could provide a truly secure social network. When asked during an MSNBC interview what he'd do if he were faced with the same situation as Mark Zuckerberg, Cook insisted he "wouldn't be in this situation." In response, Zuckerberg told Vox that Cook's comments were "glib."

Will Apple get into the social game? I would not bet against it. At the very least, I imagine Apple execs have been discussing it. Cook clearly understands the value of an ad-free social network.

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