The Social Not-Work

Hey, remember when everybody used AOL? It was this nice hedged garden that gave you e-mail and chat and instant messaging, and cost you like $30 a month. It was so cool, and hip, and in, that everybody important used it, and businesses wanted to capture that market too, so they made AOL pages, accessible via AOL Keywords. So, that latest movie to come out? You could read all about it at http://www.geocities.com/plutobay/201328457291/movie_title.html or at AOL Keyword Awesome Film of 1998!

But then something happened: The internet became an always-on think. You gave extra money to your cable company, and they gave you a little box that turned a bunch of 0's and 1's into pictures of cats doing silly stuff while sans-serif fonts provided commentary for their actions. Suddenly you didn't have to open AOL to see the Internet. You could venture into that wild jungle without even needing to go through a hedge maze. So, AOL responded: if you don't use us for your Internet connection, we'll give you a discount. And some people did that. Likewise, AOL introduced AIM, so you could chat with all of your non-AOL friends without having to leave AOL.

But, still, AOL could provide nothing, other than an e-mail account, and maybe a list of Top 10 Jokes about some celebrity or current event, to keep people around. And then they sort of fell into obscurity, such that whenever you see someone with an @aol.com e-mail address, you wonder if they're a time traveler or something. And then you wonder when you'll get an e-mail from someone using Prodigy....

AOL was an early walled garden whose bulwarks eventually crumbled. But it was eventually supplanted by some Ivy League fellow who, emulating other sites, like Friendster and Classmates (one of which was actually worthwhile), he introduced yet another social network, Facebook. Facebook got its roots with university-only user base, so early adopters felt a little high-brow, especially when compared to the new Geocities, MySpace.

Nowadays, you can find Friendster only in the Wayback Machine, and MySpace is like a derelict vessel in some sci-fi horror movie. While investigating it, you hear strange noises, and one by one, your away team begins to vanish, until, BOOM, Little Mama starts blaring about her lip gloss, and you have an epileptic seizure due to a color scheme selected by someone who was either extremely color blind, or was trying to be "artistic."

So, Facebook kinda won the Social Network Game, and many people tried to capture that fame. Twitter introduced streaming inanity, and in response, Facebook made their Wall system more inane. Twitter, really, was one of the few contenders that was able to stand up against Facebook.

And then it happened, Facebook was more visited that Google!? So, Google decides it's in their best interest to play the Facebook game.

So, they introduce Buzz, which is pretty cool. It's like the Facebook Wall, only able to be used outside of Facebook. But it didn't catch on, especially after a whole big mess about privacy. Ouch!

And then Google introduced Wave, which was also pretty cool. It would have revolutionized the work place, especially dreaded meetings, but every single company blocked it as a "chat site." So it didn't catch on.

And then Google introduced Plus (or Google+), which, as the xkcd comic says: is like Facebook, but not Facebook. This gets Facebook's attention. How can Facebook compete with a Facebook that's more open about its content?

To counter Google Takeout, which lets you export your Google+ account (and other Google stuff) in a flash, Facebook decides to block the Google Chrome plugin that lets users export their Facebooks to Google Plus.

And to counter Google's super-easy video conferencing chat deal that is fairly prominent in Google+, Facebook decides to ... what? Integrate with Skype?

Double Fail.

So, remember this, people of the present, when people of the future (hi! future people!) liken Facebook to Prodigy in their Early Days of the Internet 101.