The Clash of the Social Titans

Love it or hate it, or anything in between, one can't ignore the fact that Google Buzz has generated a pretty sizable amount of buzz.

People have attacked it from all sides: some people feel that the way they introduced it, built on top of Gmail, was an invasion of their privacy; others say it's a poor imitation of Twitter; others still say that there's nothing innovative about it, as it looks a lot like FriendFeed, a service that has become part of FaceBook.

But what stands out to me is what people are not comparing it to. They are not comparing it to Second Life. They are not comparing it to MySpace. Or Friendster or any number of other social networks which were supposed to be the next great revolution in social networks at the time they came out.

Once upon a time, Second LIfe was an industry darling, with regular stories in the Times of people making thousands of dollars selling virtual dresses, performers like Jewel doing live virtual concerts, and enterprises like IBM setting up virtual customer support and intra-company conferencing in Linden Labs' fabricated world. It may not be a ghost town today, but at least the media coverage has moved on. IBM apparently still has their resource center there (http://www.ibm.com/3dworlds/businesscenter/us/en/), so there may still be some value to having property in Second Life, but it does not appear to be a growing concern.

Similarly, there was a time when if you wanted to reach the cool kids, you had to use MySpace. New movies, rock bands and more didn't have their own web pages, instead hosting all of their information on MySpace. They took social networking to new heights, and grew so fast that media conglomerate Fox News Corp bought them up, riddled the experience with advertisements, and then watched as their user base grew up and left, or just left for the new darling, FaceBook.

It's evolution, to some degree, but at the same time, it's just history repeating itself over and ove and over. The issue is really that these social networks are built around growth, but they don't have an end goal. And unfortunately, the features and behaviors that help grow a great social network do not necessarily make for a sustainable and useful social network. Eventually, with constant growth, the network becomes clogged and noisy, invasive and indistinguishable from the outside world. In its quest to become the ultimate way to stay in contact with your family, friends and colleagues, social networks tend to ignore their own initial value proposition, which is--at least implicitly--that using that network is a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. And in their rush to include every single grain of wheat, they inevitably start letting in a lot of chaff.

I wish I had a constructive solution, but at the moment all I see is the problem. Each network has its own strengths and weaknesses, and I anticipate that we'll see a few more before one surfaces with the right tools to allow people the access they desire with the controls they need. In the mean time, you can find me on Facebook, slowly culling friends from my list.