Something, something+

On the day of the launch of Google+, the most interesting thing to me ¹ was the snarky tweets that I noticed floating around:

or

There were countless other variations on the same theme – a joke about wanting to join some other (presumably) failed, out of fashion, or unpopular social network.

I found this interesting because of the way that it points to Twitter as a fashionable, trend obsessed, performative social space – the jokes are denigrating to Google – “ha ha, Google is jumping on the social-network bandwagon again”, but underlying them is a wish to participate in the trend: “Everyone is talking about Google+, how can I talk about it too, but make it look like I don’t care?”

But mostly I was interested because the tweets point to something else — something that is slowly becoming more obvious and better understood about the nature of the corporate internet: that the web ecology is extremely unstable. Committing to any service is a risky proposition. Next year at the launch of yet another social network can we expect to see the same jokes with “Facebook” in place of “MySpace”?

1. As for the Google+ itself, there is plenty written about it already. I like XKCD’s take, and Dave Winer’s. ↩