The Economist on the Social Networking

Everywhere and Nowhere

This article came out in March 2008. Which means it was probably written/contemplated about before then, and I'm only reading it now. Tisk tisk.

Interesting points, that social networks like Facebook and MySpace, while popular, aren't really business models. Their ad revenue doesn't generate much. It's annoying, and maybe they're better off creating branded applications to keep us engaged rather than have sidebar ads.

Then the analogy of old internet service providers into web portals. Closed to open. Same now for these communities. They're closed to each other, it's annoying to have to log in separately into each site. The solution? Email. It already has all of our contacts, calendar events, and keeps track of how often we talk to who.

Makes total sense to me what the article is saying. So the question then is who's going to be first? When is it going to happen? And how are people going to sustain it as a business model? What happens after the original founder sell out?

Nothing will happen if it's open source, right? What if the whole open source project becomes funded by some tech company?

Interesting times we live in.