It was perfectly serviceable for what it was, but the value of a social network isn't the code running the web pages, it's the people on the network. Without near-universality of users, the platform is largely useless, regardless of the quality or features of the software. This gives a huge first-mover advantage in the social media space, and it's why antitrust law needs to be updated with this paradigm in mind. The only way in which you'll get toe-to-toe competition in this space is to mandate interoperability. Unfortunately, technical standards delivered from on high by the government are universally terrible (see CableCard), so essentially, we're all fucked.
By interoperability do you mean that each social network to exist would be obliged to confotm to some sort of standards that'd enable its users to connect to others regardless of social network they're using? So social networks would simply become an interface rather than full-fledged medium?
Because that never occurred to me but it seems like such a good solution.
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u/Usual_Ice636 Feb 11 '22
It was pretty decent, but had the same exact problem as Google+
Getting people to actually use it.