Google+ and thoughts on the future of social.

You don’t want to be a service, or a destination. You want to be a protocol.

Google+ has been incredibly valuable, mostly due to forcing us to reconsider the value of social networking, without the benefit of newness or an established personal / impersonal network of connections. And it has led me to a simple conclusion.

Facebook is a destination, and a platform. They tie a pile of services together, but it is something to be interacted with on their own terms, with little pellets ejected into the wider web, in the form of Like Buttons and Social Widgets. Facebook is a collection of activities that live offline and offsite, glued together by the social gravity of everyone you know being there, and easy of use due to integration into other sites.

Tumblr is an ecosystem. It is both a CMS and hosting service, but also a content discovery service. There are social elements, but Tumblr is best conceived of as the next evolution of what Livejournal was - a place to curate a private or public online presence, and stay abreast of a widening network of changes.

Twitter trends more towards being a protocol. (Yes, this is an oversimplification of the definition of protocol. I know.) Like RSS before it, the twitter experience is miles beyond the limitations of twitter.com, or even of the approved twitter functionality. Twitter is a great element that I’ve seen chopped and screwed into dozens of very different experiences. You could make the same argument for Foursquare - it is on the cusp of being more than a service, or an app. It’s becoming part of the architecture of the wider social web.

To be remixable is to achieve the digital equivalent of immortality.

Out of the three top line examples, the one I like most is Tumblr. The one I expect to survive the longest is Twitter. Facebook is in an odd middle space - the need it has for control, to be able to generate income and maintain its valuation, will cripple it from becoming part of the fabric of the evolving social web.

Tumblr is focused on remaining tumblr, and refining that use case and identity. Twitter is expanding outward, and getting integrated into new ideas and new communication concepts. Facebook is doing its damnedest to pull other experience online into itself; everything from blogs, to games, to unified messaging across all channels.

Google is trying to build a Facebook, I think, with the functional mask of Twitter. Google+ is mostly about tying activity everywhere to the same user profiles, and giving Google Search access to that data to refine its product.

You either want to be part of social behaviour online, or you want to make social behaviour online part of your product. I know where my bet goes as to what will be a success.