{This started as a Disqus reply to Eric’s post. Then I realized blog comments shouldn’t be longer than the original post 🙂 }
The app-on-network concept is fascinating: and one I think I’ve thought about previously, too.
Hypothetically, all “social networks” should have the same connections: yet there’s dozens upon dozens (I use at least 4 – probably more, but I don’t realize it). And some folks push the same content to all of them, while others (including, generally, myself) try to target our shares and such to specific locations (perhaps driving some items to multiple places with tools like IFTTT).
Google’s mistake with Google+ was thinking they needed to “beat” Facebook: that’s not going to happen. As Paul Graham notes:
“If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I’ve discussed, don’t make a direct frontal attack on it. Don’t say, for example, that you’re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations…Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong…the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary.”
That’s where folks who get called things like The Idea Guyâ„¢ go awry: instead of asking questions, you try to come up with ideas – like these 999. And if you can’t/don’t, you think you’ve failed.
Social networks should be places where our actual social interactions can be modeled effectively. Yet they turn into popularity contests. And bitch fests. And rant centers. Since they tend towards the asymmetric end of communication, they become fire-and-forget locales, or places where we feel the incessant need to be right. All the time. (Add services like Klout and Kred, and it gets even worse.)
I would love to see a universal, portable, open network like the one Eric describes. All the applications we think run on social networks (like Farmville) don’t. They run on top of another app which runs on “the network”.
Layers on layers leads to the age-old problem of too many standards, and crazy amounts of abstraction. Peeling-back the layers of the apps atop the network could instead give us the chance to have a singular network where types of connections could be tagged (work, fun, school, family, etc, etc – the aspect of G+ that everyone likes most: “circles”). Then the app takes you to the right subset of your network.
Of course – this all leads to a massive problem: security.
If there is only One True Social Network, we all end up entrusting everything we put there to be “safe”. And while some of still follow the old internet mantra, “if you wouldn’t put it on a billboard, don’t put it on a website,” the vast majority of people – seemingly especially those raised coincident to technology’s ubiquitization – think that if they put it somewhere “safe” (like Facebook), that it should be “private”.
After all, the One True Social Network would also be a social engineer’s or identity thief’s Holy Grail – the subversive access to all of someone’s personal information would be their nirvana.
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter: regardless of what network (or, to use Eric’s terminology, what app-atop-the-network) we use, privacy, safety, and security are all forefront problems.
Solve THAT, and you solve everything.
Or maybe you just decide privacy/security doesn’t matter, and make it all public.
Social Networking serves no real point except the not-yet-attained function of effectively pairing people up to achieve certain goals. Right now, it’s a room of people you know all watching a large TV while we hold our own TVs talking to other people closest to us. The only interactions being modeled are the ones that the programmer’s tend to perceive how socially adjusted people interact which isn’t corrected against a control and you wind up with a network that is filled with the Dark Triad personalities leading the conversations and trends.
I would prefer a social network that would sort me toward a person with a win-win outcome of my idea/project/book/art that they are lacking. The transaction is then a relationship and not cash like “elance.” Rather than saying “I need this. I pay you” it’s a “we both need this outcome, they’ll pay us.” It’s a disruption of the company model itself in a way. It only works on the need at the time, though. Not the “market.” “Market size” and “market share” would be pointless terms. I’ve been typing in a stream of consciousness manner so I’m not going to defend any of this.
That sounds like a great idea for an application to sit on top of a social network, but not a social network itself (assuming that a social network is merely a model of the people you know and how you know them, which I do). The network is what would ultimately search the people you know, and the people they know, to find someone that you could partner with.
The real challenge would be modeling the data specific to the application (here’s what I’d like to do, here’s what I need), and data that’s general across the network (here’s a bunch of people and how they relate). Well, that and security as Warren pointed out in this post.