state of the wub

i think we're approaching some sort of tipping point with facebook where it will simply implode under its own weight. a lot of very smart people have blogged about the life cycle of social networks. once there are enough "undesirable" people entering your social network (the creepy co-worker, the jackass classmate from your high school, the random stalker you met at a party, the homophobic distant relative), you quickly start to lose interest in wanting to share links and post updates because of the potential for an interaction that you would rather avoid.

all social networks have this problem (see friendster, myspace, orkut ...), given that the success of a social network is directly proportional to its size. of course, the fundamental weakness of a social network is also directly proportional to its size. facebook managed to bypass some of these issues by offering an application rich environment, and operating a closed network with advanced privacy settings. but that is quickly starting to catch up with it. most people don't have the time or the energy to fine tune their settings to their desired level of privacy. managing several "groups" of users is a full-time job.

i'm already starting to see a decline in the quality of interesting links and postings on my facebook feed, where interesting is defined as something that pushes the edges of our socio-cultural norms. and the "25 things" meme might just be the beginning of the end i.e. the high-schoolization of facebook culture.

the sad part is that facebook has really done a fantastic job in terms of developing a rich and usable social platform by opening up their API to the public. allowing users to contribute their own applications was a stroke of genius (though one that was effectively negated by the scrabulous fiasco, but whatever).

i think a number of us are waiting to jump to a facebook like platform without the baggage of a an overbloated network. in other words we're waiting for google to dump orkut and reinvent this particular wheel. we'll see how it goes.