by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Now, I’m well aware of the failed Google social media platform G+ and its concept of Circles. While it was a strong idea, it was really difficult for the average person to understand what the fuck a Circle was and how to practically use it. Meanwhile, there are also Reddit “reddits” and “subreddits” which are pretty much a ham-handed application of the Usenet newsgroup concept of yore.
But my Group concept is pretty easy to understand and it’s also feature rich and flexible. One thing that makes the Group concept really scalable is its redundancy. Each user could great as many public or private Groups as they wished about any subject with any name. They would also be able to manage who posted to any individual Group, which would also mitigate the risk that any specific group would grow too huge and unmanageable.
So, if there was some breaking news, there might be a dozen or more really good Groups devoted to the event where well known content creators from journalism would post full page posts on the subject that would create threads that people with the right posting rights could comment on via inline editing. Many more people could simply read these discussions without being able to post.
All these features would fix some of the horrific flaws in Twitter at the moment. You wouldn’t be limited to just 280 characters. You wouldn’t struggle to find good content and you wouldn’t feel like you were being overwhelmed with a torrent of content.
I think this is a far better mouse trap than Twitter at the moment. And I only bring this up because Elon Musk is so mercurial that he could very well kill the goose the lays the golden egg and there will be a window of opportunity for some spunky, aggressive startup to swoop in and eat Musk’s lunch. But it’s a very narrow window — it’s not like there’s any interest in social media anymore in Silicon Valley.
You would have to have some vision, some willingness to throw money at a problem that most people believe has already been solved. But, of course, it hasn’t — at least not very well. Twitter was just lucky. And it, seems, it’s luck may be about to run out.
