What will replace Facebook?

The ubiquitous social networking site Facebook has seen some changes recently. It has grown logarithmically almost as soon as it was launched and now has in excess of 350 million users. The infrastructure regularly starts to groan under the strain, and users are getting more and more dissatisfied with the service - despite the fact that it still remains free. The number of people physically running the infrastructure has grown as the site has grown, but the decision makers are still largely the same decision makers that were with the company when it first formed, and this is starting to cause problems.

The service is becoming increasingly detached from its audience, as the differences betwen the world view and culture of a group of Californian ex-students and that of the rest of the world start to show. They focus on aesthetics rather than speed, and completely miss the point about the sort of data that people want to show, and the sort of data that people want to hide.

So what can be done about it?

In my view, Facebook is doomed. It will grow and grow until it becomes unmanageable and eventually collapses under its own weight. They are already banning people without warning simply for using it too much, and the definition of what constitutes an acceptable non-offensive posting - particularly photographs - is narrowing and narrowing until soon you will only be able to post your passport photos.

What is needed is a radical re-think in the ways that social media actually functions. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc all use the single host model. Even if that host is spread across the internet on a cloud platform with edge servers and caches, fundamentally if I am connecting to Facebook I connecto a server owned by Facebook inc.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

One solution is to develop a federated model where - like the world wide web itself - sites host content, are responsible for their own content, but exchange information between each other like open-access emails and postings. Users could buy (relative term - no money has to change hands for this to work) space for their content on large farms owned by Google, Amazon, even Facebook if the survive. Or, they could set up their own server with its own rules that links to other sites and exchanges data with them.

In a model such as this the load would be distributed as far as necessary. Individuals could opt for the easier configured 'hosted' solution, or set up their own page on their own server with their own rules. Everyone could in theory be kept happy.

So in summary:

  • Each user's page becomes a micro-site that can be hosted on any internet-connected server that is capable of running scripted code such as PHP or ASP.
  • Friend connections are maintained by an exchange of data between servers using RSS feeds, and are presented as a federated news feed on the user's own site. This would be a two-way connection allowing for XML transfer of comments and other such data back to an originating server.
  • Messages link via the user's own email system, taking the address book from the friends list. This could be done server or client side, but would make the user's email account appear embedded in the site.
  • Communication protocols would have to be developed to enable the exchange of data, but these would be released as an open standard much like HTTP and FTP are released. This would allow anyone to develop solutions and plugins for sites.
  • Images and other large content would only ever be uploaded to the server of the person who uploads them. This prevents other people uploading suficient data to your server to kill it off.
  • The network should operate as a dynamic peer-to-peer system, similar to Skype, that adapts and passes the data between hosts in as efficient a manner as possible.

I'll keep coming back and updating this as I think of stuff, but that all makes sense to me. Anyone know a developer who would be interested in playing with this as an idea?