It's arguably not that interesting to consider oscillation between these two things because basically it's the same problem under two names. There's a pretty large amount of fungibility among a 90s .edu home page, a geocities home page, a Wordpress instance, highly-customized Myspace or Tumblr.
I don't meant to suggest nothing has changed. It's significant that the required technical knowledge has reduced and extraneous degrees of freedom have been removed and there are simple ways of discovering other users and their posts. It has democratized the personal page and mainstreamed something which used to be for arch-nerds. But everyone has done these things.
Most of the innovative activity of this Facebook/Twitter generation of sites seems to be in playing with different ways of locking people in (sorry: I mean being 'sticky'), getting more data and exploiting it better. Other than that, the competition seems to be mostly about marketing and network effect. These seem like continuous efforts not subject to much permanent advantage.
Does anyone ever just win on this basis? Do we really imagine that it will still be Facebook and Twitter in 30 years (like Coke and McDonalds 30 years ago)?
I don't meant to suggest nothing has changed. It's significant that the required technical knowledge has reduced and extraneous degrees of freedom have been removed and there are simple ways of discovering other users and their posts. It has democratized the personal page and mainstreamed something which used to be for arch-nerds. But everyone has done these things.
Most of the innovative activity of this Facebook/Twitter generation of sites seems to be in playing with different ways of locking people in (sorry: I mean being 'sticky'), getting more data and exploiting it better. Other than that, the competition seems to be mostly about marketing and network effect. These seem like continuous efforts not subject to much permanent advantage. Does anyone ever just win on this basis? Do we really imagine that it will still be Facebook and Twitter in 30 years (like Coke and McDonalds 30 years ago)?