Eduardo … I’m talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.

When the movie “The Social Network” came out, this line caught my attention. I’m not sure this thesis — let’s call it the “replication thesis” — was what Monsieur Zuckerberg had in mind rather than something the screenwriter came up with, but it makes sense as to what actually undergirds online social platforms of today.

In all likelihood, Zuckerberg did not at first intend Facebook to be more than its namesake — a dorm facebook. Just as, in all likelihood, Twitter was meant as no more than a status message broadcast system, at first. The fact that Facebook became something of a gathering place and Twitter became a “microblogging” service — in essence, taking over functions that used to be conducted in other ways — I think owed something to their use of a “correct” user graph for certain contexts. It was the user graph that allowed, then limited, the range of social functions that people were willing to port over to the online platform. With the undirected graph, Facebook (and clones) modeled something like a big gathering, maybe a party. With the directed graph, Twitter (and clones) modeled something a bit more nuanced, like a groupie-celebrity relationship. (Is it any surprise, then, that celebrities drove the latter’s popularity?)

But I get the sense that neither Facebook nor Twitter truly believes in the replication thesis. They’ve construed their challenge narrowly as one of periodically pushing out new “things you could do,” most of which are nowadays ignored by users, or adding more places at which you could interact, but in the same way. They don’t see that users voluntarily do on a platform only those things that are compatible with their perception of the modeled social space. You can’t push anything on them any more than you can force people to play some game at a party. Yet I see no movement to revisit the user graph and better model real social relationships with all of their complexities. If left unchanged, the inevitable result will be that the range of social functions these platforms support stagnates, and therein should lie their eventual downfall. In fact, that probably solves the supposed “mystery” of Myspace’s decline, too. It is in this context that Google+ arrives.
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