Lists have been around pre-G+. True, they don’t advertise them as being “central to the experience,” but they have been there.

Yes, that last point is essential. It depends also on how long he can keep control and whether he can keep the business simple enough so that one person CAN stay in control.

That requires patience from the shareholders. I wonder if they’re up to it?

Imperial Overreach is a good term… describes IBM and Yahoo. Nokia, Blackberry… simply overtaken by market disruption and new competitors. But some, I believe, are crippled by being acquired by those with the imperial overreach, and thus losing the creative, entrpreneurial vision required to keep making sense of these new markets. Myspace, Bebo, Last.fm… all platforms with real promise, having their innovation and leadership stopped dead in its tracks by acquisition.

Facebook might now be a publicly-listed monolith, and it might overreach in certain areas and inflict the same fate described above on others (Instagram – though perhaps they have an interesting strategy there?), but at least it’s still lead by the guy who created it. The guy who had the dream. The guy who has the vision. The one guy who genuinely cares about it. We only have to look at the history of Apple to see how important that is to the really cutting-edge tech companies.

Agreed. I believe that changes can be much faster than we were used to. Nokia, Palm pilot, Blackberry fell from grace in a few months as hardware platforms. Software platforms like FB could fall very fast too, even faster, because the switching cost is relatively easier, but it will not show as fast whenever it happens because one will not close one’s FB account as one threw away one’s old hardware. FB accounts will remain even if sleepy.

So Google has the potential to supplant Facebook… but that’s still expecting individuals to overlay their own real-world social context on top of Google+… and i don’t think people really get that yet.

I’d like a great local social network. I’d like a great music social network. I’d like a great football (soccer) social network. If all the best of those things that i and others post then make it onto the uber, all-encompassing social network, then great, but i want more social immersion in what i’m really interested in… and not what the average person has to say about the (usually, distinctly less than) average TV show on any average, drab weekday…

Gimme depth, gimme context, gimme immersion, gimme meaning… i think i can handle more than one social network in my life, but to be honest, i’m struggling to handle 2 ‘uber-social networks’ vying only for the big prize…

Or the organisation may be simply too unwieldy to react to change.

Either way, a huge empire can become irrelevant overnight.

In tech we’ve seen this with IBM, Nokia and Blackberry. Yahoo would be a good case study. Closer to Facebook it’s what happened at Bebo and Myspace.

Or the organisation may be simply too unwieldy to react to change.

Either way, a huge empire can become irrelevant overnight.

In tech we’ve seen this with IBM, Nokia and Blackberry. Yahoo would be a good case study. Closer to Facebook it’s what happened at Bebo and Myspace.

It’s a plausible hypothesis David, though there are possible ways to avoid it, such as renewal. It is absolutely possible that Facebook is past its peak. But it will take a long time for any other than a handful of players, notably G+, to rival its size and presence.

Many early adopters have been on several social networks already. Many more only slowly moved on to Facebook, and would take much longer to shift onto another platform.

That’s essentially what I describe as ‘open social networks’ in the post, but there are many variations on the theme. However this kind of platform is likely to take a long time to get 1 billion users…