Have we moved the goalposts?
Yesterday's post asking if Google+ had "made it" prompted an interesting discussion with responses ranging from the positive to the contrary, including that it is "still broken" and an absence of mainstream media in some areas means it hasn't.
Things have changed over the past few years and what was required to succeed perhaps no longer applies. Facebook and Twitter were not just working to gain credence for themselves but were also working to gain credence for "social" as a whole.
We may have had the likes of Friendster and MySpace, and they may have been quite cultish in their own right, but social did not become recognised as a useful medium in the mainstream until Facebook and Twitter put it there.
Now, the hard work is done and we live in a society which accepts interactions on social networks as valid. It is, therefore, easier for new networks to gain public acceptance without, necessarily, the need for adoption by mainstream media.
Yes, there are still loose ends and there is still a perception problem with Google+ (although I'm going to refer to this as not seeing the bigger picture from now on) but ever more people are "upgrading to Plus" and making their own assumptions about the service to fit their requirements.
The internet has evolved; we now live in "social times" and there is no longer the need to swim upstream and fight the current as the goalposts have moved.
Image by Paul Bratcher Photography.
