Social Today Feels Like Search A Decade Ago: Lots Of Noise And Lots Of Spam

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn't know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn't imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately. For a good history of search, get John Battelle's book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It's a mess, but we don't complain much about it because we don't know there's a better way. Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I've got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I've got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.