"I don't think anyone is going to build a social network from scratch whose only purpose is to connect people. We've got Facebook (personal), LinkedIn (business) and Twitter (SMS-length for mobile)."Huh. Maybe he's right? The monopolisation of the social networking market is rather unfortunate and, I suppose, rather unhealthy - but it is probably and ultimately necessary owing to the current business models of social media (i.e. you've got to have a gargantuan user base to turn a profit). The 'big three' (above) have already trampled over the others to get to the top out of necessity.
However, Arthur's suggestion is that 'standalone' social networking websites are dead, rather than social networking itself. Social networking will, of course, continue; but it will be subsumed into other services as part of a package. How successful these will be is anyone's guess. This situation is contrary to what many commentators forecast several years ago. Commentators predicted an array of competing social networks, some highly specialised and catering for niche interests. Some have already been and gone; some continue to limp on, slowly burning the cash of venture capitalists. Researchers also hoped - and continue to hope - for open applications making greater use of machine readable data on foaf:persons using, erm, FOAF.
The bottom line is that it's simply too difficult to move social networks. For a variety reasons, Identi.ca is generally acknowledged to be an improvement on Twitter, offering greater functionality and open-source credentials (FOAF support anyone?); but persuading people to move is almost impossible. Moving results in a loss of social capital and users' labour, hence recent work in metadata standards to export your social networking capital. Yet, it is not in the interests of most social networks to make users' data portable. Monopolies are therefore always bound to emerge.
But is privacy the elephant in the room? Arthur's article omits the privacy furore which has pervaded Facebook in recent months. German data protection officials have launched a legal assault on Facebook for accessing and saving the personal data of people who don't even use the network, for example. And I would include myself in the group of people one step away from deleting his Facebook account. Enter diaspora: diaspora (what a great name for a social network!) is a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network". The diaspora team vision is very exciting and inspirational. These are, after all, a bunch of NYU graduates with an average age of 20.5 and ace computer hacking skills. Scheduled for a September 2010 launch, diaspora will be a piece of open-source personal web server software designed to enable a distributed and decentralised alternative to services such as Facebook. Nice. So, contrary to Arthur's article, there are a new, innovative, standalone social networks emerging and being built from scratch. diaspora has immense momentum and taps into the increasing suspicion that users have of corporations like Facebook, Google and others.
Sadly, despite the exciting potential of diaspora, I fear they are too late. Users are concerned about privacy. It is a misconception to think that they aren't; but valuing privacy over social capital is a difficult choice for people that lead a virtual existence. Jettison five years of photos, comments, friendships, etc. or tolerate the privacy indiscretions of Facebook (or other social networks)? That's the question that users ask themselves. It again comes down to data portability and the transfer of social capital and/or user labour. diaspora will, I am sure, support many of the standards to make data portability possible, but will Facebook make it possible to output and export your data to diaspora? Probably not. I nevertheless watch the progress of diaspora closely and I hope, just hope they can make it a success. Good luck, chaps!
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