I have to say it immediately grabbed me when @StephenFry tweeted:

 Well, well, well! Move over FB and Google+ ? Can’t fault unthink.com for attitude – youtu.be/pxMqSdgB-uA

Unthink! What a great name! And it’s Stephen Fry right? The man is a hero, one of the smartest, nicest, funniest chaps on the entire planet, by co-incidence he’s actually living in the same city as me right now, and of course, he has a bazillion dedicated twitter followers, so getting a link from him is actually pretty powerful! He almost single-handedly transformed our Kiwifoo #blackout campaign a couple years ago when he blacked out his twitter avatar to help us fight Section #92a – which, by the way, the Labour party have actually admitted they were wrong about – and half the twittersphere, or at least it seemed so at the time, followed in his wake. We actually got the government to change it’s mind. The first time, I suspect, that Twitter was the most significant driver of a movement that changed the law, or impending law, of a sovereign nation, but far from the last!

…but then I actually watched the video, and my heart sank:

Here’s the problem: It seemed way too slick. I have a nose for these things. When it comes to spotting true revolutionaries vs PR companies pretending to be revolutionaries, I think I’d have a better chance than most.

So, I started digging. There wasn’t much on the unthink.com homepage, just a simple signup form, no privacy policy, no manifesto, no “about us”, just a great looking design and a not half bad slogan: “We are not another social network. We are a Social Revolution.” Uh huh. Right. I signed up with a fake alias and then immediately checked out their DNS records.

I started posting my investigations to Quora as they progressed….

(me:) They’ve got a *very* swish video up … tweeted by @StephenFry no less. Must confess the privacy angle is one I’ve often thought might be worth taking a crack with, but then Diaspora didn’t seem to be setting the world on fire. This is a much slicker attempt. Frankly, the production values reek of money, which makes me wonder who’s money

…hoping someone else would chip in. No one did. But 20 minutes later I pretty much knew who we were dealing with, and my trust barometer had dropped several notches.

Ok, I feel this is commentary relevant to recently breaking news, so I might as well tweet this now and then post a follow-up – if you have some thoughts, please do comment here or on my two quora questions, and/or feel free to link this post from your posts in other fora so that this post will show the pingback/trackback links.

Meta: Yes, I’ve been off the air for a while. Sorry about that. I got a bit distracted. Starting with that 6.3 Earthquake that left our city completely “munted” (to quote the Mayor) back in Feb, of course, but the parade of distractions since then has been somewhat epic. This unthink.com is hardly the most important, but you have to understand that for an internet geek, #privacy and #freedom fan like moi, it’s pretty darn interesting! And since I suspect I’m well ahead of the curve in digging into the details, and I wouldn’t want @StephenFry to inadvertently lead us into signing up en masse for something that in the end seems, contra initial appearances, a bit shallow, I fear, I felt I really ought to post something. But hopefully I’m completely wrong! Looking forward to finding out!