Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

"It turns out there are strong economic incentives for doctors to keep patient information to themselves — and even stronger incentives for electronic medical records not to play nicely with each other."

"While patients might want one hospital to exchange information with another hospital, those institutions have little incentive to do so. A shared medical record, after all, makes it easier to see a different doctor. A walled garden — where records only get traded within one hospital system — can encourage patients to stick with those providers."

Much worse between people who aren't so well acquainted. I'm actually in the middle of trying to mediate a disagreement based mainly on two entirely different perceptions of intent in some stuff that was written in an email.

Nonetheless, these are the assumptions I see:

1. The software alternatives or successors must be commercial.

2. The software must attract a certain quantity of users to be viable.

3. The software must enable networks comprising large numbers of people, perhaps in the millions or billions.

This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends.

Over the years Facebook may have morphed into a "public square" for exercising "Free Speech" but in the beginning as I recall it was not a means to broadcast to other users outside of ones social circle.

Its primary utility is arguably still in enabling communication within small groups, not enabling broadcasting to the general public.

Wu's assumptions point toward a Zuckerberg-like centrally-managed approach to what I see as historically a locally-managed activity: the human tendency to form small groups.

For many years, gamers and others have been writing software to enable small groups to communicate over peer-to-peer networking, without any funding from advertisers.

Wu writes, "So what stands in the way of a genuine Facebook alternative? It isn't the technology."

Thats exactly right. IMHO.

Yes, but only an individual Facebook user. The problem is that my friends' friends' friends' friends' friends' friends encompass the entire human race: at some point, as I invite people who invite people who invite people, the underlying technology has to be able to support all mankind.

Indeed, I suspect that this — not some momentary privacy-failure flash-in-the-pan will be what leads to Facebook's actual downfall. It's ultimately building a proprietary Internet (in the sense of a fabric which connects people), and that's extraordinarily expensive. At the end of the day, the actual Internet is able to do that far more cheaply.

I imagine that the replacement for Facebook will be something like email: something under the control of its users, something anyone will be able to add himself to and anyone will be able to block.