I'm seeing a lot of kids signing up for Vero . I just read about it and I do commend some of its distinctive features.

• No ads? Sure! Although it seems that will be a paid service in the future. I think it's acceptable, when micro payments are much easier and common, paying a few bucks a year will seem natural for newer internet users. Current internet userbase wants everything for free which is big part of the problems we see today with websites.
• No algorithms, not bad! Since they don't need to data mine me. They don't have incentives to tweak what I see. Maybe due data overflow I could somehow filter things out.
• Fixed privacy controls. I agree that Google plus circles didn't work, mainly because people never ended making circles or didn't know where to start. I endorse the idea of the fixed 4 levels. If like to see where it goes.