People seem to really be upset with Facebook this time! Naturally, I think this is great. I’m on record as a Facebook curmudgeon, having almost entirely displaced my anger over the flight of my friends from social blogging — a change that was probably inevitable thanks to the progression of age and career — onto the service that so many of them fled to.
But I feel some ambivalence, too. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s fruitless to consider social networking products in terms of their absolute, instantaneous attributes. A changed privacy policy is just one small force in a vast landscape of shifting demographics and trends. Considering the situation as if the market is settling down, converging on some stable attractor — (“blogs and Twitter are the answer and always have been — now they can take their rightful place!”) — that’s a shallow way of thinking about it.
I’m convinced that online society has a rhythm. A while ago, I proposed a lifecycle for social networks. I’m pretty sure that that latter hypothesis will prove to be hopeless, that those considering the question won’t be able to draw any firmer conclusions about the fall of Friendster than historians have about the fall of the Roman Empire. But there’s no doubt in my mind that these systems are fundamentally dynamic, and subject to entropic forces even beyond their maintainers’ sinister efforts at profit-maximization.