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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I think it's interesting to note here that despite Facebook, Google, and Twitter's best intentions, new social networks grow faster today than ever before. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat exploded in a manner of weeks.

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There was a great post a few weeks back here about why whatsapp, viber et al had such a dramatic growth. Basically, the hypothesis was these apps have access to the entirety of the user's contact data on their phones, which allows them to reconnect with our friends automatically (or fallback to sms/email). Ironically, I think this is something where Google+'s circles could come in very useful for us (meaning, normal users): if Google stopped pushing Plus as an end goal unto itself and instead started integrating it at a lower level in android and provide APIs accessible to other websites, it could have massive privacy and usability advantages for us. Cyanogenmod is doing something similar, but I think they're implementing it as a everything-or-nothing switch for apps. Providing more granularity (and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed) is something that's sorely needed if we want to move away from facebook's monopoly on our social graph.

>and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed

I should hope they got circles right as it was the most obvious thing in social networking ever. 30 seconds into my very first usage of facebook and I already realized it was missing what google calls "circles".

WhatsApp and Snapchat are examples of growing by doing the exact opposite thing of twitter: make a useful service for all of us who doesn't want the world to know about our every move but still have group chats with 10-20 people at a time. They also tell us up front how they are going to make money. They have earned my trust despite of their authentication issues a while back,

- and, unlike twitter they have a lot of space to move in (pay for api access anyone? Voluntarily subscriptions to feeds? )

It also shows the opportunity for a new open standard to emerge very quickly. The timing feels right. The battleground seems to be photo sharing this time, not links.

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