I think the main hurdle to creating a successful social network is thinking of these networks as websites or web applications.\u00c2\u00a0The real networks exist offline and the web apps are a way of organising or augmenting those relationships.<\/p>\n
At first I thought that the success of a network depended on how much it acted as a site-independent platform. You can see with Facebook and Twitter in particular that they have a useful API that has encouraged a ecosystem of applications and tools to flourish around them. New challengers have to compete, not only with the application itself, but the way it has embedded into the web.<\/p>\n
But now, I’m starting to think that the distinction between Facebook as a website and Facebook as a platform is a natural extension of the fact that these sites must mirror offline relationships to be successful. If I have a close circle of friends, I don’t have to leave them behind in one place and then reassemble them in another. The tools exist (phone, IM, email) to communicate at all times, around any subject.<\/p>\n
We don’t need a new social network for every conceivable topic because Facebook already fills that need. But conversely, we ultimately don’t need Facebook because even without it, \u00c2\u00a0our relationships still exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think the main hurdle to creating a successful social network is thinking of these networks as websites or web applications.\u00c2\u00a0The real networks exist offline and the web apps are a way of organising or augmenting those relationships. At first I thought that the success of a network depended on how much it acted as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,68],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236,"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamewhale.com\/whalespeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}