The end of Kitchen Sink Social

I haven't heard about Google Plus since Google announced it was becoming optional last year. It seems certain at this point that it will fade into obscurity and then be quietly killed like so many Google products before it. At one point, Plus was Google's golden child. It was given enormous resources, basically every Google product was integrated or being integrated into it, and employee bonuses were even tied to its performance. Yet it still failed.

Many factors contribute to that failure, not least of which was trying to take Facebook on its home turf and failing to distinguish itself meaningfully. "It's like Facebook but on a different site" is a compelling value proposition for a small subset of the population, but basically meaningless to everyone else. Those arguments are fairly well-trodden at this point, but I think there's a factor that hasn't received as much attention: Plus was based on the Kitchen Sink model, and nobody wants Kitchen Sinks anymore.

There was a time early in the internet age when Kitchen Sink was the go-to model for all software. Netscape started with the first popular web browser, and ended up with a browser, calendar, e-mail/newsgroup client, groupware, push notification server, and a nasty case of irrelevance. ICQ, the first instant messenger, ended up as an instant messenger, sms gateway, news ticker, email client, game center, greeting card service(!) and a historical footnote. It was the inevitable progression of 90s software development: start doing one thing well, end up doing lots of things badly.

Those particular examples form part of the storied attempt to create the perfect Internet Suite, a kind of one-stop shop for all things internet. Today that sounds as ridiculous as saying you're going to create a "Food Suite" with all the foods anyone might want to eat. The internet does so many different things that having one particular software product to capture all of it is necessarily inadequate. And yet with Google Plus we see the same mistake again. They tried to roll up all of their products into one big Social Suite.

The problem with this isn't just that you end up stuck with stuff you don't want to use, or that mediocre products are propped up by good ones, though that certainly didn't help. The problem with the Social Suite is that people want to keep their online selves separate. From an engineering perspective, it seems super elegant that your accounts across all different services share data and reflect one single identity. From a human perspective, it's a complete nightmare of unintended consequences to everything you do.

Google is, mostly, an infrastructure company. Search, AdSense, YouTube, Gmail, Maps: all things you use because you want something else and Google provides the plumbing to get it to you. But they swapped it out for Smart Plumbing, where my search queries change my Maps results, and reviews I leave in Maps and comments I leave on YouTube appear in other people's Search results under my real name. That is immensely, profoundly creepy. I can't predict the consequences of my actions anymore. Anything I do on any Google product could end up anywhere on any other Google product, and I have no way of knowing what or where.

You might think Facebook presents a counterexample to this idea. After all, they are the quintessential Social Suite. But I think they are a temporary outlier. Facebook got a free pass because it so quickly exploded into popularity and has been riding the network effect ever since. However, in recent years people have begun migrating to smaller, more specific social networks. Facebook's answer has been to buy those networks: WhatsApp and Instagram were both acquired. SnapChat, Twitter and I'm sure many others got offers.

Yet there's something interesting about how Facebook has handled those acquisitions. WhatsApp and Instagram both still have their own separate identity, they didn't get rebranded. The userbases haven't been merged, and I don't think they will be. At least, not in the ill fated Google-YouTube "don't not click on this button to not leave your accounts unmerged" sense. I think Facebook recognises that people want an Instagram account and a Facebook account, and a sensible path for connecting the two in a way that the link remains under your control.

I believe that in the long term, even Facebook's current level of centralisation is unsustainable. Facebook is two things: a site that people visit to interact with their friends, and the social infrastructure that underlies it (and their other products). Facebook-the-site will inevitably fall out of fashion (and already has, for some groups). Facebook-the-infrastructure, on the other hand, can continue to exist as the backbone for whatever comes after Facebook-the-site. Facebook Messenger is an example of how this is already starting. I wouldn't be surprised to see more parts split out into their own identities.

Ultimately, I don't think there is any place in the future of the internet for a Social Suite. Google tried and failed. Facebook succeeded, but is already backing away from the idea. The truth is nobody wants everything they do online to be connected to a single identity. Individual services will slowly take marketshare from monoliths until the only monoliths left are the ones that implement individual services themselves. Kitchen Sink Social is dying, and I for one can't wait to see it gone.