I am increasingly left wondering how long social networks - Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn - can survive. They can disappear absurdly quickly - remember Friendster? MySpace? And I think that dissatisfaction with the existing sites is strong enough that users will quickly drop them if something better comes along. There are several issues. One is the lack of privacy and security. This is what Paul Prinsloo addresses in this article. But there's more. Another are the sorting algorithms that struggle with the basic contradiction between what we want to see and what the social network makes money showing us. Another is the steadily dropping quality of discourse on these sites. The advice to "never read the comments" should now be applied to the daily news.
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