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A large service is a service where your friends, parents, coworkers, etc have a high probability to have already joined, thus making the service instantly more useful for communicating with them. Next thing is that you and they will pull in your other related people, again for ease of communication. This is the "network effect". For a federated service, like email or phone, this is not a problem: the union of all service providers is the entire service, and more providers can connect. So connecting to any compliant provider is fine, and providers have an incentive to be good, or at least outcompete each other by some metric. For a siloed and sealed-up service, like Facebook or Twitter, once you and (most of) your social graph is there, there's no way anyone can connect from the outside; to be connected with you, they need to dive into the same silo. The bigger the service grows, the harder it becomes for people outside not to consider joining, because of the pull of the part of their social graph who already joined. I think that federated services will always exist, as long as unimpeded internet connectivity is allowed. I also think that 1-2 huge walled gardens will also exist, for the same reasons why phishing using dancing kittens videos will continue to exist: many humans are emotion-driven and don't value [insert a list here] when overwhelmed by a positive emotion from something new, cute, and free to use. |