Diaspora is a sad story: a team with great intentions but little systems experience, becoming the standard-bearer for distributed social networking. They gained attention from some random factors (frustration with Facebook at a peak, NYtimes story, Kickstarter).
I think the odds of there being a single winner-take-all provider of social networking services (SNS), forever and ever, are slight. The idea that kids are going to stick with the SNS their mom uses to play Farmville seems ridiculous to me. So we should see some amount of fragmentation, eventually.
It also seems absurd to me that Facebook will remain agile enough to shut out competitors while also supporting 500M+ users. At some point, a situation should arise where competitor SNS services will find it to their advantage to be interoperable. That could end in an oligopoly, but that still counts as a more distributed social network.
Larry Page often likes to say "don't bet against the internet". And I am old enough to remember when people thought that Microsoft's Project Blackbird was going to kill the web. I am confident that SNS, like almost all internet services, will be commodified at some point, and probably sooner than we expect.
Caveat: this hasn't quite worked out for instant messaging, so I could be wrong.
I'd bet against you, but I don't think your definition of "gain significant traction" is reasonable.
It's pretty easy for a network to get 1 million sign-ups, and then it's pretty easy to get 1 million people to pipe their Twitter status's into it. See Identica etc.
That doesn't mean is has significant adoption as a social network - it's really just a Twitter client.
I agree that there will be many social networks, but I don't think there is much reason for them to interoperate.
Take a listen to Eric Ries talk about his experience building an interoperable IM client[1].
He built the whole thing, then showed it to heavy IM users and they were (paraphrasing) "err.. why would I want that? I already run 6 IM clients, running another isn't a problem. And I don't want the same people to see me on each one"
We already have an interoperable, distributed social network for messaging purposes. It's called email. I doubt another one is needed. (OTOH, I did build a Pubsubhub powered demo of one back in the FriendFeed days. The technology was cool...)
Trillian is either a good or bad example, depending on your perspective. I don't want to have N IM accounts; I want to have one account/identity that can reach everyone. That has not happened with IM and I am skeptical that it will happen with social networking.
You may be close to winning already. Identica was at half a million (may not be active) users two months ago. Adding in StatusNet, TWiT Army, and all the other nodes it could be there.
Those bet terms seem really odd. Your bet is that within 3 years, there will be a distributed social network with at least 1M users? Am I reading that correctly?
Google Plus, which people aren't even really sure is a success yet, had 10 million users in less than a month. Is there some reason that you chose the number 1M as significant traction? If anything, those terms suggest to me that you're not really convinced it's going to happen.
buddycloud already claims over 500K users and seems to have significant momentum, some developer discipline, and is using well-known standards, even if XMPP isn't everyone's favorite standard.
And as others mention, you might want to count identi.ca too.
If you think my bet is too paltry perhaps we can raise the stakes.
However, note I said greater than 1M monthly actives, which is a more serious measure of traction than just user accounts.
1. People are uncertain whether Google Plus, a centralized social network, will gain significant enough traction to become a force in social networks.
2. Google Plus, in 2011, has had extended periods (weeks, months) where it gained 1M users every 3 days (the number of users in the bet). Thus, orders of magnitude more than 1M users is not sufficient to necessarily be a substantial social network.
3. In 2014, presumably there will be even more users on the Internet, and it will be possible to gain traction even faster than in 2011. Further, a social network might need to be even larger to be a substantial force in 2014.
4. Therefore, why would one set the threshold for "significant" traction for distributed social networks in 2014 at one network with 1M users, when that number may be orders of magnitude too small to be relevant in 2011?
(This ignores the question, of course, of what counts as distributed and/or what counts as a social network.)
Obviously, Google Plus is not distributed, or else one of the people would have already won the bet, since Google Plus already has millions of users!
I am confused, however, by your comment about users rolling over from Gmail. First, do you have evidence for this claim? (If anything, it seemed to be false in the case of Buzz.) Second, how is it relevant?
Google Plus is a new service that goes with your Google account, just like Gmail, Documents, Maps, etc. They don't count as new users if they already have a Google account.
He's not saying Google Plus fulfills the bet, but rather that the user base it has amassed is an example of why winning the bet would be meaningless, or at the very least an unnaturally easy target.
Comments
I have a bet with random_walker that a distributed social network will gain significant traction by 2014.
http://twitter.com/#!/flipzagging/status/16766878672228352
Diaspora is a sad story: a team with great intentions but little systems experience, becoming the standard-bearer for distributed social networking. They gained attention from some random factors (frustration with Facebook at a peak, NYtimes story, Kickstarter).
I think the odds of there being a single winner-take-all provider of social networking services (SNS), forever and ever, are slight. The idea that kids are going to stick with the SNS their mom uses to play Farmville seems ridiculous to me. So we should see some amount of fragmentation, eventually.
It also seems absurd to me that Facebook will remain agile enough to shut out competitors while also supporting 500M+ users. At some point, a situation should arise where competitor SNS services will find it to their advantage to be interoperable. That could end in an oligopoly, but that still counts as a more distributed social network.
Larry Page often likes to say "don't bet against the internet". And I am old enough to remember when people thought that Microsoft's Project Blackbird was going to kill the web. I am confident that SNS, like almost all internet services, will be commodified at some point, and probably sooner than we expect.
Caveat: this hasn't quite worked out for instant messaging, so I could be wrong.
I'd bet against you, but I don't think your definition of "gain significant traction" is reasonable.
It's pretty easy for a network to get 1 million sign-ups, and then it's pretty easy to get 1 million people to pipe their Twitter status's into it. See Identica etc.
That doesn't mean is has significant adoption as a social network - it's really just a Twitter client.
I agree that there will be many social networks, but I don't think there is much reason for them to interoperate.
Take a listen to Eric Ries talk about his experience building an interoperable IM client[1].
He built the whole thing, then showed it to heavy IM users and they were (paraphrasing) "err.. why would I want that? I already run 6 IM clients, running another isn't a problem. And I don't want the same people to see me on each one"
We already have an interoperable, distributed social network for messaging purposes. It's called email. I doubt another one is needed. (OTOH, I did build a Pubsubhub powered demo of one back in the FriendFeed days. The technology was cool...)
[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2273
Trillian http://www.trillian.im/ have been selling their cross-platform and interoperable IM client for over a decade.
If people didn't want Eric's interoperable IM client, it wasn't for lack of a market.
Trillian is either a good or bad example, depending on your perspective. I don't want to have N IM accounts; I want to have one account/identity that can reach everyone. That has not happened with IM and I am skeptical that it will happen with social networking.
A niche market != significant adoption.
I know lots of people using Linux on the desktop too. It's a market, but isn't really significant in comparison to its competition.
You guys should put your bet on www.longbet.org!
You may be close to winning already. Identica was at half a million (may not be active) users two months ago. Adding in StatusNet, TWiT Army, and all the other nodes it could be there.
http://identi.ca/conversation/75407544
Those bet terms seem really odd. Your bet is that within 3 years, there will be a distributed social network with at least 1M users? Am I reading that correctly?
Google Plus, which people aren't even really sure is a success yet, had 10 million users in less than a month. Is there some reason that you chose the number 1M as significant traction? If anything, those terms suggest to me that you're not really convinced it's going to happen.
I chose those terms to win easily. ;)
buddycloud already claims over 500K users and seems to have significant momentum, some developer discipline, and is using well-known standards, even if XMPP isn't everyone's favorite standard.
And as others mention, you might want to count identi.ca too.
If you think my bet is too paltry perhaps we can raise the stakes.
However, note I said greater than 1M monthly actives, which is a more serious measure of traction than just user accounts.
Google Plus is not distributed, and they gained most of their users rolling over from gmail.
I believe you misunderstood my point.
1. People are uncertain whether Google Plus, a centralized social network, will gain significant enough traction to become a force in social networks.
2. Google Plus, in 2011, has had extended periods (weeks, months) where it gained 1M users every 3 days (the number of users in the bet). Thus, orders of magnitude more than 1M users is not sufficient to necessarily be a substantial social network.
3. In 2014, presumably there will be even more users on the Internet, and it will be possible to gain traction even faster than in 2011. Further, a social network might need to be even larger to be a substantial force in 2014.
4. Therefore, why would one set the threshold for "significant" traction for distributed social networks in 2014 at one network with 1M users, when that number may be orders of magnitude too small to be relevant in 2011?
(This ignores the question, of course, of what counts as distributed and/or what counts as a social network.)
Obviously, Google Plus is not distributed, or else one of the people would have already won the bet, since Google Plus already has millions of users!
I am confused, however, by your comment about users rolling over from Gmail. First, do you have evidence for this claim? (If anything, it seemed to be false in the case of Buzz.) Second, how is it relevant?
Google Plus is a new service that goes with your Google account, just like Gmail, Documents, Maps, etc. They don't count as new users if they already have a Google account.
He's not saying Google Plus fulfills the bet, but rather that the user base it has amassed is an example of why winning the bet would be meaningless, or at the very least an unnaturally easy target.
Caveat: this hasn't quite worked out for instant messaging, so I could be wrong.
Aren't Google Talk and Facebook Chat both based on Jabber/XMPP, though?
I think that fragmentation (esp. by interest, and even more so by profession) will make SNS much more profitable in the long run.