Bear's Log

A number of times in the recent past I’ve read either in a blog post or on Buzz/Twitter or via an aggregation site like Digg, that this social site has failed or that social site is dead. Sure, from the point of view of the poster, that site has failed to perform - but I contend that it’s all the more likely the only real failure is that of expectation failure.

It seems to be that lately a site can only be a success if it reaches tens of millions of users, heck even Google pulled Wave because of the fact that it required more engineers per user than usual and it had not reached some magical user size. My hunch is that Google has gotten large enough of an organization that it now has the problem of team politics and it may have died due to a lack of internal power or will, because for sure it wasn’t a failure of technology that brought it down. (ok, sure, maybe a lack of UX vision - but that is solvable and the reason you have beta tests.)

This expectation failure is in both directions. We as users approach a site with a given level of anticipation and it’s a rare site that doesn’t do something that makes you sit back in your chair and go “ouch, wasn’t expecting that”. But now, with the continuous development cycle and the need for a certain churn in the media, a site doesn’t have three or four months to test out interfaces or feature sets - it is assumed it will deliver on those features now. And heaven help you if a Scoble or a Leo find your site before it’s ready and has it’s feature focus stable and ready, because nothing can prepare you for that ;)

So when your reading about how this site has failed (or heck, has EPIC FAILED) please do remember that for the most part we are all traveling in the same echo chamber that is the early adopter scene. That some folks are broadcasters, some are analysts and some are consumers and that a viable ecosystem needs all three to thrive. Within this ecosystem you will always find the struggle to maintain balance between the forces and often the “top of the food chain” folks will sometimes seem to be acting out of step with the others.

It is my contention, and what I have been badly striving to make as a point (just remember i’m a behind-the-scene dev type, not a words-smith) that often, in order for growth to happen, something needs to shake up the status quo - be it something new or one of the more mature/stable pieces to do something different so as to give a chance to one of the up-and-coming pieces. You can’t have growth without change.

I would also like to point out in my ecosystem analogy above I don’t mention the sites themselves and where they fit. That is because, to continue the analogy, the echo chamber is like that little bird (a Plover IIRC) that alligators allow to walk around their heads and in their mouths. The echo chamber and the social media industry are symbiotic and exist in the realm of, heck exist for the use of, us normal users - not the other way around.