In the beginning, there was America Online.
The nation was blanketed, first with 3.5” floppy disks, then with the infamous CD-ROMs, as screen names, chat rooms, and instant messages entered the human consciousness. Incidentally, AOL was also where pirating music became available to pretty much anybody with an internet connection and some curiosity. AOL file-sharing chat rooms were around long before Napster.
Then, as the broader world wide web came into being, America Online began to fade away. Its successor, Yahoo!, was a weak ruler, and soon lost its crown to Google and a strange website known as Myspace.
Myspace was the leader of a crop of websites the buzzword hungry media dubbed “Web 2.0” as a way to hype the fact that people were now using the web to do the things they used to do on America Online. The fundamental difference was that the only barrier to marketing yourself to Myspace’s members was simply to become a member yourself—as opposed to AOL, which presented much steeper obstacles to obtaining an official marketing presence.
Artists and bands started marketing themselves with Myspace pages, and soon every wannabe band, rapper, DJ, comedian, and beyond were handing out business cards with the web address for their Myspace page. Eventually, Myspace became so crowded with self-promotion that most actual people jumped ship to the upstart Facebook.
Thus did Myspace’s Greece give way to Facebook’s Rome and we entered the age we currently reside in. For a brief time, it seemed we had entered a sort of “end of history” with Facebook, as it became easier to integrate various social media engines into one aggregate. Facebook to keep up with friends and family, Twitter for news and entertainment, and Instagram for photo sharing.
Unfortunately, not all the kids in the sandbox wanted to play nice with each other, and fissures began appearing in the social media kingdom. Twitter, seeking to emulate Facebook’s hegemony, began severely restricting the ability of third-party apps to access its functionality, the idea being that it was desirable to gain greater control of how people experience the service.
This same philosophy was at play with Instagram’s recent decision to terminate support for sharing its photos via Twitter. The justification given by the company’s CEO for this move is that they want you to “consume” an Instagram image on the official website because they “think that that’s a better experience.”
Of course, the truth is that Instagram, along with their new parent company Facebook, are desperately trying to monetize their membership, in Facebook’s case to justify the billions of dollars raised in the IPO. The primary means of doing that seems to be to attempt to control how people use the service, the better to put ads in front of their eyeballs.
Another aspect of Facebook’s effort to squeeze revenue from its membership is to force the musicians and other artists who promote themselves to pay for the privilege of having more than 10 percent of their postings appear to people who have “Liked” their page. While this is certainly going to raise revenue in the short-term, over the long-term, it makes Facebook less valuable to its users, and has already started driving people away.
The same thing goes for Facebook’s endless interface updates. It can be assured that the main consideration when designing the much-maligned “Timeline” was how to best catch our eyes with advertisements.
The central mistake that all the social networking companies seem to be making is underestimating people’s desire to have things “their way.” People want to interact with social media in whatever way best jives with their life’s rhythm, and not be forced to adapt to whatever method the company believes will best monetize them.
To offer an example, I only used Twitter occasionally, and that was only once I was able to keep it in the same aggregator as my Facebook, which I use constantly. When Twitter stopped supporting third-party apps, I stopped using Twitter—not out of protest, but out of inconvenience.
In addition, the vaunted potential of social media to enable democratic movements around the globe—such as Iran’s Green Revolution—comes in no small part to the inherent freedom of communication the services provide. By seeking to restrict the way people can use these services, social media companies could put quite a damper on this phenomenon.
Maybe that’s the idea.
Either way, by making their services less open and more restrictive, Facebook and company are going to find themselves left behind as the internet evolves, just like Myspace before them, and America Online before that.
Sure, they’ll still be around, just as Myspace, Yahoo!, and venerable old America Online are still online and offering their services. But like those obsolete creatures, they will find themselves outside the party of the zeitgeist, punchlines to “Remember When We Used To…” jokes.
