Why Facebook won’t take over the Internet

So there’s been a lot of talk since yesterday about Facebook’s plans to consolidate everyone’s social graph, create one big feed of life, and essentially take over the internet in the process. I think Facebook is continuing to roll out some fascinating technology, but I’m not so sure that one social network will ever rule all, because the fact is real people segregate their social interactions.

We’ve always had multiple social graphs, even offline

Maybe there was a time in college where our friends, colleagues, and interests were all melded into one group of people (Maybe it’s still like this for people who work at college type companies like Google and Facebook?). But, as your life gets more complicated, that one social graph tends to sort of branch as our interests in life evolve.

When I take my son to a birthday party, I don’t go there expecting to talk about linked open data with all the other parents. And on the other hand, I didn’t go to Chirp last week expecting to talk about how to manage children’s video game time or what’s going on with school redistricting. And the family reunion isn’t a good place to talk about why Activity Streams don’t just use RDFa.

The same dynamics are happening online. My Twitter graph, for example, is all about my professional interests. I follow people who have interesting things to say about software development, the internet, open government, Gov2.0 and so on. On the follower side, excluding the spammers, it’s the same picture. It’s all people who share those particular interests. So I’m not going to share a camera I want to buy or some clothes I’m looking at or some blocks code I’m writing with those people, because all I would be doing is adding a lot of noise.

And so I participate in online forums that are specific to certain interests, I keep my Twitter world more professional, I use a personal email addr for certain friends and family, I use LinkedIn for other things, and I can’t see myself ever wanting to put all of that together into one big hose. Just looking through my browser history, I can’t find a single page that I would want to “like/share” with everyone I know.

It would be a lot of work to tag every thing I read or write about, so I do what a lot of people do which is just maintain different social graphs on different sites, online and offline, to “tag” things for me.

This is why social aggregators haven’t caught on with regular users

If everyone I follow on Twitter shared every online interaction, every checkin, every personal interest, every dish they liked, every political statement, I would stop using Twitter. The noise would just be ridiculous. And I think that’s the real struggle with tools like Buzz and what Facebook is building now. Right now the interface isn’t there yet for me to be able to quickly say “this is something of interest to these 5 camera geek friends”, “this is something interesting for my iPhone friends who code”, “here’s something for iPhone fans who don’t code”, and so on.

This is why Google Buzz wasn’t immediately interesting to me, especially with the initial cut at sharing settings. This is also why I have 4 different email addresses. It’s also why most people use SMS, multiple phone numbers, email, IM, Facebook messages, gists, and dozens of other modes of communications, all in the same day.

Again, I can think back in my own life in school where my friends were my friends and my colleagues and I didn’t have a lot of interests outside of what we did together as a group. But I think the general consumer or worker is not like that.

Now the problem with that is I may have 10 different actual social branches, each of my friends has 10, and they have varying degrees of overlap. So the real interesting work will be in coalescing conversations from these different graphs, not in real time, but at the right time around a particular subject like health care reform or Grand Central Dispatch.

To me that is a much more interesting problem to solve, and more applicable to real lives, than creating the one big graph or the one big firehose.