I suspect the frontier of social network strategy will draw more and more upon deep study of these adjacent and much older social capital games. Fashion, video games, religion, and society itself are some of the original Status as a Service businesses.

Streaks, of course, have the wonderful quality of being unbounded. You can maintain as many streaks as you like. If you don't think social capital has value, you've never seen, as I have, a young person sobbing over having to go on vacation without their phone, or to somewhere without cell or wifi access, only to see all their streaks broken. Some ... See more

If you look at the respective mission statements of Twitter and Facebook—"to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" and “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”—what is striking is the assumption that these are fundamentally positive outcomes. There’s no qu... See more

Perhaps old dogs don't learn new tricks because they are closer to death, and the period to earn a positive return on that investment is shorter.

Facebook, with its explicit attachment to the real world graph and its enforcement of a single public identity, is just a poor structural fit for the more complex social capital requirements of the young.

Whether you believe in the 1/9/90 rule of social networks or not,

Trickle down economics works, but often just down the veins of family trees.

a new Status as a Service business must devise some proof of work that depends on some actual skill to differentiate among users.

Then, one day, Facebook snapped its fingers like Thanos and much of that dependable reach evaporated into ash. No longer would every one of your Page followers see every one of your posts. Facebook did what central banks do to combat inflation and raised interest rates on borrowing attention from the News Feed.