social networking

2012: Facebook plays catch-up with mobile. Not many people realize that Facebook had an existential scare when the action in computing shifted from the desktop to our pockets. This made Zuckerberg paranoid about being behind again when the next big thing arrived. He was determined to avoid what Clay Christensen called the Innovator’s Dilemma, which posits that dominant companies are doomed when the next paradigm arises, because their success—and their thinking—is tied to the current paradigm. When Zuckerberg saw an Oculus…

A week before Elon Musk closed his $44 billion Twitter deal, Cassie LaBelle, a writer who is part of a transgender community on Twitter, started a Discord server. “I don't know if Musk is gonna buy & destroy Twitter or not,” she wrote, but she hoped her server would be an interesting experiment. Beyond that, the server could in time become a safe space for the community of trans people she has cultivated over more than a decade.“There is nothing that can replace it,” says LaBelle. “No one has what Twitter has.” For…

Olsson didn’t really promote her Date Me doc, but Chana Messinger, a teacher and blogger, tweeted it out in March 2021, saying, “I love this genre of thing: people putting themselves out there, saying clearly and publicly that they want a partner, and knowing who they are and what they're looking for.” Messinger went on to share a thread of some of her favorite Date Me docs, a celebration of the subculture. It’s fascinating to browse through them, and a little voyeuristic. They also require a much longer attention span…

A French social media platform launched by Alexis Barreyat in 2020, BeReal recently reached the top of the free download charts on iOS, surpassing TikTok. The app initially gained popularity overseas, then attracted dedicated posters on US college campuses. Americans are now its primary user base. BeReal’s recent surge in downloads can be partially attributed to a string of viral TikToks referencing the social media app. BeReal sends users a prompt at a random time each day, urging them to snap a picture and send it to…

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has prompted many users to switch to other social networks with a similar pedigree. A case in point is Mastodon, which saw over 30,000 new user sign-ups in a single day, said Mastodon chief executive Eugen Rochko. The sudden influx of new users has also slowed its servers down. “Mastodon is slow right now, as far as I can tell because there are twice as many people using it at the same time as ever. I’m working on making it go fast again," Rochko…