{"id":1793,"date":"2015-02-26T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/?p=1793"},"modified":"2015-02-25T16:50:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T00:50:00","slug":"chris-messina-future-social-networks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/entrepreneurship\/chris-messina-future-social-networks\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Messina: The Future of Social Networks (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second\u00a0installment of our\u00a0two-part interview with Chris Messina, best-known as the man who invented the hashtag.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last week we brought you Part One of our\u00a0conversation with Chris Messina<\/a> where we covered life after Google, behavioral economics, predicting the future, and creating communities.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t yet\u00a0had time to read Part One<\/a> and its full introduction to Messina, here\u2019s the gist: he\u00a0worked in\u00a0development and user experience, as both a consultant and founder, until 2010 when he joined Google and worked on their (then) brand-new social network. Since leaving the company in 2013, Messina has continued to be a thought leader in the tech community with a strong presence on Medium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Part Two, we discuss defining success in software, the hashtag, innovating across cultural and privilege divides, and what privacy means in a time when we give away our precious digital reflections to social networks for free.<\/p>\n

What do you see when you imagine the next social network?<\/h2>\n

Essentially what I see happening are young people picking up mobile devices and creating an entire computing context and frame of reference on these devices.<\/p>\n

Unlike me and my cohort, they\u2019re not really growing up as hybrids \u2014 spending most of their time on mouse and keyboard devices and filling the gaps with their mobile devices. Rather, the mobile device is their computer, and sometimes they need the help of a mouse and keyboard.<\/p>\n

This inversion will have huge and lasting consequences, and it will largely be felt in the simplification and directness of the experiences that become the norm in subsequent years. To be more concrete: now that everyone is a publisher, we need publishers to be more concise.<\/p>\n

This explains the core attractiveness of Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat. When you limit how much people can publish, you make the consumption of that content more efficient. People want to be entertained, but they also want to get in and get out.<\/p>\n

Nailing the right set of activities, media objects, and reactions is the way to think about creating social applications. So users don\u2019t necessarily want features \u2014 what they want are tools that help them to express themselves and communicate, in bite-sized moments that fit into their hectic lives.<\/p>\n

Why do new social networks fail so often when they have a lot of initial interest?<\/h2>\n

(I’m thinking specifically of Ello and other recent, smaller ventures.)<\/h3>\n

Failure depends on your definition of success.<\/p>\n

If Ello<\/a> is an art project, then I\u2019d argue that it\u2019s largely successful. If it aspires to offer freedom and ad-free living for everyone on the internet, I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s going to pull that off.<\/p>\n

They certainly got people talking, and they do have a concentrated, active user base, but will they find conventional success where App.net or Diaspora didn\u2019t? No, I don\u2019t think so. And the problem is that the pain they\u2019re trying to address \u2014 or the economic imbalance they\u2019re trying to correct \u2014 simply isn\u2019t salient for most internet users.<\/p>\n

If Facebook can help you get in touch with your friends faster and more reliably than Ello can, then using Facebook means that you spend less time futzing with technology. That\u2019s a killer feature.<\/p>\n

If you want an independent social network to succeed, you need to adjust what success means. Network effects are extremely difficult to overcome. Heck, even Google couldn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

Do you have any advice for someone building a social network?<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve started saying that \u201csocial software\u201d is redundant because almost all software \u2014 especially mobile apps \u2014 ought to be inherently social somehow.<\/p>\n

The problem with building a new social network is that the address book and Facebook already exist, so it\u2019s hard to motivate the reconstitution of the social graph unless you\u2019ve identified a narrow segment of people that are otherwise not efficiently connected.<\/p>\n

If you can identify a niche, create software that connects its members together in real and valuable ways. If it makes sense to persist those connections through a social graph, you can add \u201cfollow\u201d or \u201cadd to friends\u201d buttons.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t start by trying to build a social network; start by creating a context where people can work or share together to create value that wasn\u2019t being produced before.<\/p>\n

For example, the Known project is cleverly focused on students and teachers. They espouse similar values to Ello, but are attempting to serve a specific group of people that desperately need to be better connected.<\/p>\n

Many entrepreneurs solve their\u00a0own problems through innovation. Do you use that method?<\/h2>\n

For the past 20 years, it\u2019s proven prudent to focus on problems apparently relevant to young, white men. The context and pain points are familiar to us, and we can create solutions that we can convince our friends to use.<\/p>\n

But increasingly this approach is limiting, short-sighted, and insulating. There are now more internet users unlike<\/i> this cohort, and as the internet spreads around the world<\/a>, the trend will only broaden.<\/p>\n

This is a good thing! But it means that entrepreneurs need to adopt a more humble and curious attitude towards the world, its people, and their unique and interesting challenges. This is where design and ethnography come in \u2014 enabling creators to better understand communities of people unlike themselves.<\/p>\n

After all, it\u2019s these people \u2014 the ones just getting onto Facebook for the first time \u2014 who represent the era of growth for technology products. Doing this effectively means getting outside our comfort zone and meeting them where they are.<\/p>\n

I have to mention the hashtag. I think it’s fascinating that Twitter outright said it would never catch on.<\/h2>\n

I love Twitter, largely for its quirkiness. It\u2019s kind of like the Napoleon Dynamite of social networks. It\u2019s so odd, but it doesn\u2019t really realize how odd it is, and also thinks it\u2019s pretty fucking hot shit. Somehow, it seems to be both.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So it was with the hashtag, this super nerdy idea that I borrowed from IRC, and presented to Twitter leadership in 2007 because I thought it would make Twitter more useful without much engineering effort.<\/p>\n

But their vision was informed by their time at Google, and since Google is all about big data and complexity and algorithms and not asking their users to think much, I think Biz was like, \u201cNo, Twitter needs to be simple and hashtags make it more complex. People don\u2019t even understand what a tweet is \u2014 how are we going to teach them about hashtags?!\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, it wasn\u2019t like they rejected the hashtag specifically, they just had faith that technology would solve what turned out to be a pretty human problem: getting people to tell you what the heck they were talking about in 140 characters or less.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve written a fair bit about privacy. Can you elaborate for our readers?<\/h2>\n

The competition between Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter to own us, the users, is fierce. And as is typical with new industrial cycles, the individual has never had less economic clout to compel these companies to reward us for the value that we create on their platforms.<\/p>\n

I mean, according to PrivacyFix<\/a>, my account is worth\u00a0about $26.16 to Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Messina<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet the data I store with Facebook is way more valuable to me. They\u2019ve got my friends, my photos, my timeline, data from the Facebook Connected apps.<\/p>\n

So what if I threaten to quit? They\u2019d lose \u2014 what? \u2014 $26 in value on revenue of $12.47B. There\u2019s a complete imbalance in our individual sovereignty over these service providers.<\/p>\n

These companies know much more about me and my preferences than I probably do, and are constantly learning more. The platforms used most consistently and that harvest data about users should provide significant user benefits \u2014 from better customer service to personalized experiences to economic benefits.<\/p>\n

But how will we ever be able to negotiate a better deal when we\u2019ve already bargained away our data for next to nothing? Sure, I\u2019ve had a few friends quit Facebook, but invariably they come back. Welcome to the Hotel California of the internet.<\/p>\n

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