New Data: Google+ Public Posts Decrease by 41% Over Past Two Months

The plan descriptions on the fastmail.fm web site make it sound like you have to sign up for their $40/year "Enhanced" plan before you can use your own domain. It's still a good deal, obviously, but not as good as $5/year.

Google+ is a great product, but what I think is happening is that "social" is starting to play itself out. It's not new and fun anymore. If Google+ puts forward a mediocre showing, it won't be a result of any failure of the product, but because it was a late entrant into a game that's winding down.

(I'd like to avoid too much discussion of Real Names. As ill-advised as the RN policy may be, Facebook has a similar policy. By the way, RN is not about being "evil". It's about requiring people to use a certain utility as a social networking site and not as "something else". A Real Names policy sends the message, "We want these use patterns only". The problem is that culture is emergent and "social" can't be enforced from the top down. When you try to control culture in a heavy-handed manner, you piss people off.)

I remember when I started using Facebook. I thought I was coming in at the tail end of the thing (October 2004) although, in hindsight, it was just beginning. The product was buggy and crappy, but it filled a real need on a college campus (getting in contact with people you met briefly) and it was fun. The weekend after it came to my college, we had people in the computer labs at 4:30am using Facebook.

The bureaucratic and cultural nightmare of "Real Names" wasn't an issue on a college campus, because a non-RN profile wouldn't have been useful in Facebook's original context. There was no need for a heavy-handed policy, as non-RN profiles would just be ignored.

"Social" isn't fun anymore. It's not that interesting a space. It's about as enthralling as an electric bill. Facebook is losing U.S. activity. All of this certainly isn't Google+'s fault. It's just that people are expecting more (but the amorphous "more" consisting of people not knowing quite what they want) from social and no one has figured out how to deliver it.

My best guess is that "social" is going to be dormant and very boring for the next few years. It won't "end", but it will gradually get blander. None of the major players (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) are going to die but disruption and true innovation are going to be scant. Most efforts in "social" will be about scaling and shaving milliseconds off of latency benchmarks: important stuff, but very boring from a user's perspective. People aren't going to make friends they wouldn't otherwise make because a social networking site is 25 ms faster.

Then, there will be a radical revision of "social". It will be given a new name, as "social" has been used too much by douchebags. The disruption might come from a rogue group of "intrapreneurial" innovators within Google+ or Facebook. Or it might come from one of the lesser (but more interesting and purposeful) concerns like Meetup. Or, it might come from a startup that doesn't exist now. But I feel that there will be something exciting in social mid-decade.

What I think it will look like is a "programmable" ecosystem where people can develop their own "social" software, without having to learn complicated APIs and authentication systems. App Stores are a predecessor. Collaborative project support and multiplayer user-created games are next. Accessible and cheap "cloud computing" (i.e. relational databases that scale instead of the unmanageable horror that is sharded MySQL) will come later. My best guess is that we'll start to see the first innovations in this direction around 2013-14. What's keeping it from happening sooner is not a hard technical blockage, but a lack of interest from entrenched players. The best way to get into "social" right now and stand a chance of doing something interesting (not overnight, but in time) is to build tools that make genuinely interesting development, with low overhead and an allowance for part-time contribution, easier.

When Facebook started, Real Name policies weren't needed because the purpose was social networking on a college campus. A few "joke" profiles were created but, in general, non-RN profiles were ignored and therefore harmless. By the time Facebook officially set a Real Name policy in place, it had established momentum and a (somewhat negative) reputation.

The reason for the moral double standard is that people love Google and hate Facebook. Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil" and the company has done an admirable job of following that policy. Facebook is expected to be "evil" (in the Microsoft sense, not the Pol Pot sense, of the word) so a heavy-handed RN policy might disappoint people, but it's not a surprise.

What's actually behind a Real Name policy isn't "evil" so much as a bizarre and unenforceable mandate: You Must Use This Utility As A Social Networking Site. It's a very mandarin attempt to impose culture from the top down, when we know from experience that culture is emergent and can't be imposed on people without pissing them off.