Consider the ecosystem of the internet plus phones and computers as "the social network". You'll see what we have actually works how you'd like, right now.
Facebook lets you talk to your old friends, twitter lets you meet new ones, and google plus is there if you want to get serious. Tumblr for a more expressive context, and wordpress for the rest.
The problem with creating a new social network is that you'd have to replicate a dozen companies with varying degrees of porosity in their services.
Add to that my second point: we don't know what we want yet. Things are still evolving and developing, in a high pressure cauldron of talent and money. Once things cool down and take shape we'll see what we like and someone will spend time making open source plugins. It's a really fun time to play on computers.
Consider the ecosystem of the internet plus phones and computers as "the social network". You'll see what we have actually works how you'd like, right now.
Not quite, because everything is so heterogeneous that there's no unifying, consolidated view to help me use it.
I want a single private, secure, easy to use platform to look up my friends and colleagues on-line, and on top of that I want to have convenient plug-and-play functionality for everything from IM to sharing photos to collaborating on a coding project to scheduling a business meeting.
Right now, we have the Internet infrastructure sitting a level below all of this, and numerous web sites (not to mention e-mail, IM tools, Usenet, distributed version control systems, etc.) trying to be both the platform and one or more of the plug-ins. This is not what I want as a user, i.e., as a person who wants to get stuff done and doesn't really care whose badge is in the corner of the screen as long as it all works properly.
Facebook lets you talk to your old friends, twitter lets you meet new ones, and google plus is there if you want to get serious. Tumblr for a more expressive context, and wordpress for the rest.
The problem with creating a new social network is that you'd have to replicate a dozen companies with varying degrees of porosity in their services.
Add to that my second point: we don't know what we want yet. Things are still evolving and developing, in a high pressure cauldron of talent and money. Once things cool down and take shape we'll see what we like and someone will spend time making open source plugins. It's a really fun time to play on computers.