Do you think that one year from now your online behavior will be the same? – what about five years from now? Stop and think about it for a minute. If you are like most people, you will say “of course not” - things always change – systems change and our own needs change, and often these two things drift apart so that something that once had an important place in your life is no longer useful.

I think I have a pretty good idea of where social media is going. Probably lots of other folks do too because “spending less time on social media” seems to have become almost the zeitgeist – or “spirit or our time”. It has been exemplified in viral videos like “Look Up” and in endless blogs and self-help articles about how to get your social media actives under control, and there’s lots of evidence that people are taking this advice to heart.

Designed to be “sticky” not efficient

I read somewhere that when people look back on this era we are in, they will be astounded by how much time we spent online in mostly useless activities- a shocking three hours a day by some measures. We have to remember that, most social media applications are purposely designed to waste as much of our time as they possibly can. To put that another way, they are designed to be “sticky” not efficient. This allows them to maximize the all important “time on site” metric so we reveal more of our interests through posts, comments and “likes” – information that is then sold to advertisers. As has been observed, we are not the customer, we are the product.

The social media companies are well aware of this shift and are scrambling to address it. It as been widely reported that many of the big centralized social media sites are fragmenting as users spend more time in specialized applications. The recent attempt by Facebook to force its members to download its messaging application is purportedly so they can continue to control your contacts and dominate your time. This has been documented n a recent Huffington Post article “The Real Reason Facebook Is Forcing You To Download Messenger“:

Facebook says it’s forcing people to move to Messenger because the app is faster and has more features. But the real reason is that the company wants to protect itself by diversifying its offerings. Simply put, Facebook doesn’t want to end up like another Myspace, all but abandoned for the next big thing. “Imagine a future where the News Feed becomes less important to people,” said Nate Elliott, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, a research company. “They don’t want people to stop using Messenger just because they stop going to the News Feed. And that’s the risk they run if it’s all bundled together.”

I am not a big user of Facebook. Remember that adults weren’t allowed to use it when it first started, and when I finally got around to setting up an account there I let it add all my email contacts which was a huge disaster. That’s another story but as a result I adapted Google+ as my social network instead so on this issue I may be a bit atypical. I have met some truly amazingly cool people on Google+ – some who may be friends for life, but since it is essentially a copy of Facebook it has many of the same issues. It is purposely designed to be a time suck. Google employees were actually paid a bonus to increase that “time on site” metric and it is ridiculously inefficient in even its most basic functions.

Has “the stream” outlived its usefulness?

Recently I did an experiment – I decided to try to use Google+ “backwards” and instead of spending time in the stream, to go directly to the profile of people I like instead to see what they have been posting about lately. It is almost impossible to use Google+ that way – almost like they wanted to make that difficult but what I found surprised me. People seem to be leaving Google+ even more than what I assumed – or more accurately, they simply aren’t posting anymore (not many people delete their accounts, they just walk away). What’s worse, many of the people who have left were some of the most interesting and creative people I have ever met online. What’s left is an awful lot of “social media consultants” – not exclusively but enough to affect the character of that network.

Here’s the problem with this: while my stream my still be moderately interesting and entertaining, it is now completely useless as a way for keeping up with people. With this important “use case” Google+ has failed. Since I am not much of a Facebook user, I can’t say whether or not the same thing is happening there – maybe it is to a lesser degree, but I do think “the stream” is no longer serving the needs of most of us.

The stream is a near perfect example of “survivorship bias” – as Wikipedia defines it, “the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that ‘survived’ some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility“. Most people know the famous example – in WWII engineers desperately wanted to stop Allied bombers from being shot down, so they analyzed the bullet holes where returning bombers had been shot, and reinforced those areas. It didn’t work – just as many bombers were being shot down until someone realized that they were analyzing only the planes that had survived and had been shot in non-critical areas. The bombers that didn’t survive had been shot in critical areas that the engineers never even saw.

This is exactly what I learned when I looked at my Google+ contacts “backwards” by going to the original profile: The “stream” that was presented to me was that of the survivors – the “non-survivors” – people who no longer post, were not visible to me so they got much less of my attention. Out of sight, out of mind..

We are all hyper-connected: now what?

Most young folks may not be all that aware of this, but before social networks, and Facebook in particular, leaving college or moving to a different city was a sad event. Unless you were very close, and knew their parents, there was a very good chance you would be saying goodbye forever. While some other network would probably have come along had Facebook not done it, this did provide the important need of our society – “keeping up with our friends” no matter how distant. To a certain extent, this had to be done by one centralized application – it allowed us all to be better connected.

Times have changed, however, and this particular “use case” is now satisfied. We are all now “hyper-connected” – not just on one, but on many networks. We don’t think twice about letting Linkedin or Twitter read our email contacts, and we happily add the people we know when they are found on other networks. Now, however, there are even more places we have to keep up with people – it has become even more of an inefficient, time consuming choir. What was once a huge advantage, has become a hindrance, and clearly ,this is no longer cutting it. People are hungry for something different – something designed for them- for their interests and needs, and not designed to serve the needs of the big social media companies and their advertisers.

What will the future bring?

Do we know what these next generation of systems will look like? Predicting the future is always a risky business, but I think the basic outline of what people will want in the next generation of social networks is emerging, and may already exist in different systems:

1. People-centric vrs Stream-centric. While spending time in “the stream” may be a harmless pass time and mildly entertaining, I believe it has seen its day. I think people would rather know what their friends and associates are up to, and what’s on their mind – whether that appears in a fast moving stream or not. I am not sure what this infatuation with the stream is, because all the social networks have the data for a “people centric” interface, but few of them are designed this way. We are alomst like hamsters on a wheel, constantly churning out content and posts to just fill the basic human need of keeping up with our friends and associates. A better design would simply let you make sure you have seen the most recent posts of your associates even if that was weeks ago. We don’t want to have to jump through hoops to fill this basic human and business need – we want this process to be efficient.

2. Interest-Based. Somewhat related to the stream issue is the need for systems that are more interest based. It is really surprising how many of the big social networks have missed the boat on this because it would make the user experience infinitely better. On Google+ people who follow me,have to follow “all of me” whether they want to or not. Since I use it as a multi-purpose network, this causes some problems – not just for me, but for everyone. People might like my business posts, but not care for some of my humor – or vice versa – or they may like my jokes but hate my progressive politics, or again vice versa. The technology doesn’t accommodate this however, because there are no “user interest channels”. With the exception of the sensible design of Pinterest, few social networks do. Do people really want to see a near random collection of posts on all matter of topics in their streams? I think that for many people this is getting a little old and in the future “interest based” networks will prevail.

3. Platform Independent. If you like someone, or if you consider them to be a potential business associate or customer, you probably want to know more about them and what is on their mind, but to you really care where they express this? So what if they share their thoughts on Facebook, Twiter or on their own blog – your alligenence should be to this person, not to a social media platform. A while ago there was a system called “Gist” that did this. It has since been pulled from the market, but it was amazing – and a little scary to see what your associate were saying on other social networks. It almost felt like spying – but it wasn’t – these were things they were saying publicly, and it really helped to get to know people much better. I think in the new era we will see systems like this re-emerge – if they haven’t already. I know that several of the CRM systems to be headed in that direction – and FullContact will consolidate this data for you, but there are probably others doing this as well.

4. Meeting New People. With the possible exception of Facebook, which has a well established use case of “connecting with people you know in real life”, people often participate in social networks to meet new people. Google+ participants often boast that “Google+ is great for meeting new people” but that is not quite accurate. It is the user community on Google+ that is good at this – and doing it in spite of the technology, not because of it. The technology itself is terrible at it – almost designed to make it more difficult, and Google still seems to be infatuated with “the social graph” and “who we know” even though they are really bad at it. They often recommend people to me because they follow some of the same people I do – something I couldn’t possibly care less about. Can you meet new people on existing social networks? Of course you can, people do it all the time, but is is often a difficult and convoluted process that is time consuming and relies a little too much on chance occurrence. In the coming era, the process of meeting new people will be streamlined – it will be faster and more friction-less to make introductions and meet like minded people with similar interests.

5. Meeting Local People. One of the really wonderful things about social media is how it has allowed us to meet, and even sometimes befriend, cool people from all over the world. Still, there is nothing like real life- and meeting someone from your own town who is interested in the same things you are is the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae. Years ago during the early days of the Internet, I remember being at a meeting at a local college where the speaker slammed his fist on the podium and described his vision of the future: “I’m saying if you want a baby sitter in your neighborhood, you will be able to find one with just a few clicks”, he shouted. Strange, but after all these years, we still aren’t there yet. I always thought the dating sites – if they weren’t culturally restricted to meeting people to date would have been pretty good at this but they didn’t go in that direction. I know there are lots of applications now working to satisfy this use case, but as far as I know none has emerged as a standard yet, and they would need a pretty big “critical mass” to be useful. In the post social media era, however, I think “meeting local people with similar interests” this will be one of the big things people want.

6. Focused on speed and efficiency. In the near future, people will want networks that are lighting fast and super efficient – if they don’t already now. I recently completed a quixotic experiment to use Google Contacts as a CRM but had to abandon this effort. The reason? – it was dog slow! So slow that I would think about doing some quick task while waiting for a contact record to be displayed – ridiculous. The best designed systems actually count the key strokes for every possible user interaction – and the fewer keystrokes the better. Especially with information about people it needs to be immediately available without forcing the user to poke around. In the coming post social media era, users will expect information to be quick and easy to retrieve.

7. Posting what you want. Every social network, whether you realize it or not, has its own culture. For this reason, there are cultural restrictions on what you can post on most networks, though they may never be expressed in the terms of service. Most people just know this intuitively or learn from experience – what you can get away with posting on Tumblr, for example, is very different than what you can post on Facebook. On Google+, while no longer resembling the “I am a Google employee eating a doughnut” meme, is still very “Googley” (the term they use for the cultural indoctrination of their employees), and you have to be super careful about criticisms of Google there. That is just wrong – people should be able to post more or less ‘whatever they want” – it almost defeats the purpose of a social network if you can’t. Related to this is the problem of “flooding the stream”. We have to worry about posting too much, because we have to worry about bombarding people with our posts. While I don’t necessarily know how this will be accomplished, I believe technology can and will solve this problem. In the coming post social media era, people will be able to post what they want, when they want and will be able to showcase their own material.

8. Reading what you want. Closely related to “posting what you want” and the discussion on “interest based” as well as “efficiency” systems, people should be able to read more or less what they want. That means if you are not in the mood for politics or baby pictures, but want to read the business posts of your associates, you should be able to do just that. Feed readers like “Feedly are pretty good at this- why aren’t our social networks? In the coming post social media era, systems will be much better at letting us read the kind of posts we want to read from our associates.

9. Ownership of your information. Last, but certainly not least, people want a much better sense that they are the owners of what they post on social networks, and even (maybe especially), of their own profile. I am not trying to pick on Google+ but that is “the devil I know”. I remember reading an article in Pando Daily about Google+ where they talked about the “despair” they felt when after posting a thoughtful and carefully written post only to see it disappear and get immediately buried in a fast moving stream where is was essentially lost forever. That is a problem with most stream-based social networks – the “shelf life” of our posts can be ridiculously short and we have much control over the presentation of our own material.

The problem with this is that while many of these functions could be satisfied with the emergence of another big centralized system – a “Gist” type application”, for example, that allows us to track our friend’s activities on multiple networks, many of these functions cannot. Most social networks are simply not designed to let us “post whatever we want” and “read whatever we want” and they certainly don’t give the even the sense of “ownership” of our information.

Could “Peer-to-Peer” technology be the answer?

The “holy grail” of social and business networking, has always been peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. It seems to be talked about more than it actually happens though and I still don’t know of any major systems – with the possible exception of Skype in its early days, that have actually taken off. Lot’s of systems claim to be P2P – like Disporia for example, but I am not really sure they are. Although I am not a programmer, I wonder if this has had to do with the limits of this technology. While thinking of this a while back, I remember wondering if somehow some of the bittorrent networks could be used for this purpose – perhaps with our profiles as individual torrent files.

Recently, while writing some material about “WebRTC” for a client, I realized that this might be the perfect technology to use for a P2P “interests based” social network. For those who don’t know, WebRTC is a protocol that allows real time communication real-time communication between web browsers with no central server. It has not been formally accepted as a standard, but is backed by Google and is already embedded in both Firefox and Chrome. While it has been around for more than four years, most non-technical and many technical professionals have never heard of it even though it is now being used in some really amazing and innovative systems.

Others have discussed the possibility of a “peer-to-peer” social network using WebRTC – and a few system have even been built – for example “Create a Mixer” for video meetings. While that looks like fun, I had something more basic in mind and think I know how an “interest based” network could be designed. By adding CRM elements could even get around the “chicken and egg” problem that plagues most social network startups – that you need members to get members. This idea is currently being vetted by a small group of professionals and we recently decided to open source it – so contact me if this interests you and you would like to contribute. As of yet we have found no “show stoppers” that will prevent it from being built.

This is not what the Internet was supposed to be

Regardless of whether the system I have in mind ever happens, I am convinced that our current way of doing things is not stable. I wonder if some of the big media companies – especially Google, knew what they were getting into and really wanted to manage “a stream” of potentially most of humanity. Bad players will always know how to take advantage of these systems and they will always require human intervention – and I think that it the thing these companies hate most. They just want to build beautiful and elegant systems and step back and watch them run – and of course, rake in the cash.

More significantly, however, it is not what people want anymore, and it is not really good at anything. It is not good for posting, it is not good for reading, you can’t “post what you want” and you don’t even really own your own material. We are essentially “unpaid content creators” for the big social media companies.

Eventually, of course, the social networks as we know them will fade away. Nothing lasts forever – empires rise and fall, and they too shall pass. The question, of course, is “what will take their place?”. I read a blog post not long ago that said “the replacement of the car has already been invented” – meaning that the technology for some new kind of transportation was already out there somewhere, we just don’t know specifically which one will prevail. It is entirely possible that this “post social network” has already been invented too – but if it has, I don’t know what it is. .

What I do know, is that what has evolved is no longer working. The Internet was supposed to be free, and democratic – and empowering of the individual, not a technology that tricks us into serving the needs of big corporations. We are creatures of habit, who have become prisoners of habit. Like lobsters being slowly boiled, we never knew when to jump out of the pan. It is way past time we figure out how to take the Internet back.