Bill Joy is the man who brought us Ethernet. He also formulated a law: the value of a network is directly proportional to the square of its nodes. One fax machine is worthless. Two fax machines can talk to each other. Two hundred fax machines are universally useful.
I think about this because in the last couple of months, two different people I know have set up their own alternatives to Facebook. I fully expect that one or the other will win out, for the sake of eliminating redundancy. Slightly different approaches, too – one is a social-networking Facebook-workalike while the other is a bog-standard bulletin board type system.
The problem is that this covers one social circle. Am I really prepared to have one social networking service for my crazy internet friends, another one for people I know locally, another one for the high school crew, one for the extended family…you see how this becomes crazy in a hurry. This is why Facebook won – everyone is there – but also why it’s vulnerable, because it still offers very poor controls for handling the interaction of your various circles. I firmly believe that something like Diaspora is going to be a game-changer; somebody who can come up with a standard for social network interoperability other than Facebook Connect will make out like a bandit….
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the crazy Internet friends version. Seeing as we’ve been “together” for almost 16 years now, I think its chance of survival are pretty good regardless of what else happens in the social networking realm. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be the final medium we all use to communicate with each other. On the contrary, we are used to shifting from one medium to another as time, standards, and expectations change.