What social network has the widest and most comprehensive userbase? No contest, right?
Now, think about which of the web services you regularly use the worst-coded and hardest-to-use of the lot.
Same answer, isn’t it?
Facebook is shitting on the possibilities promised by the Web 2.0 movement by achieving uncontested market dominance and a de facto monopoly on social networking, and then providing a sub-par, badly-designed, hard-to-use service with a Byzantine user interface which is in constant (pointless) flux.
The Web is a key medium of social interaction now. Pervasive high-bandwidth wireless Internet access and easy-to-use wireless handsets have made this an inevitability. If you’re a creative professional, a politician, or under the age of 30, social networking is simply not optional if you are going to be effective in mainstream society.
Sure, you can drop off the social networking grid and still be plenty productive and socially satisfied, but you can hardly make the argument that effective use of the social web couldn’t expand your influence and help you make connections.
So what it comes down to is both a question and a challenge:
Why do we put up with this?
The simple answer, the cop-out, is that there isn’t really another option.
Orkut has a ten-years-ago feature list and is populated primarily by Google codemonkeys, and effectively no one has heard of it. MySpace sucks. I’m going to repeat that, because I think it’s amusing that two words fully encapsulate the nature of the world’s first social network: MySpace SUCKS. Diaspora fizzled like a wet firecracker, because it turned out the devs wanted to be New Mark Zuckerberg instead of setting social networking free. Friendster? Don’t make me laugh.
But as I said, that answer is a cop-out. This is the INTERNET, people! Our bricks are pixels, our mortar is markup! The cost/benefit ratio for Web services is astounding compared to anything that has existed before. How much of his own money do you think Zuckerberg put into building the largest informal network of people IN HUMAN HISTORY? I don’t know numbers, but I know it’s an infinitesimal fraction of what it would have cost to do this fifteen years ago.
I don’t have the skills to engineer a network to compete with Facebook. I had high hopes pinned on Diaspora as a real competitor, but they were brought down by hubris and mis-management. I’m not the builder, and maybe I’m not even the architect. I just don’t have the skillset or the resources to actualize this thing.
What I do have is the drive, the passion, and the resolve to push it forward and make it happen. I want a free Internet. I want people to be able to find and connect with clients for their freelance design work. Plan and publicize killer parties with five minutes’ effort. Tell the whole world they love someone and want to spend their lives together. Introduce the world to 1hataburger. Organize a rally to shake off the chains of bigotry and discrimination.
Who else wants this? Who else wants the social Web to be free? None of us can do it alone, but if enough people want it, we can make it happen. This is how paradigm shifts happen. This is the seed of revolution.
We have the means, the motive, and the authority to do this. Let’s take back the Web, y’all.
