Semi-Social

Like Social Networking but with an emphasis on supporting small/private, maybe Real World Social Network-s.

• cf platforms supporting many mostly-separated smaller networks - Social Warrens

PathCom seems to qualify.

So do many Mobile Messaging apps

• like WhatsApp - how many people do you want to give your phone number to?

In the history of human communication, the FaceBook post is a highly unnatural way to interact with friends and acquaintances. It’s akin to standing before a room filled with every single person you know and delivering a presentation about your personal life. You really don’t want all of those people listening, since a lot of them won’t care and a few of them you’d rather not tell. Sure, Facebook’s privacy controls let you target posts in principle, but in practice it’s a lot of work, especially when you’re trying to share something quickly. This overly public nature is a big reason why Facebook, long stereotyped as a teenage obsession, today has a self-admitted problem with young people. Namely: They are leaving. By one estimate, some 11 million fewer high school and college kids in the US use Facebook today than did three years ago. Increasingly, kids don’t want to be on a network where their parents can so easily monitor their communi­cations. The generation that has grown up with social media is also wary of its permanence—that picture you post today may come back to haunt you when you’re ready to find a job. Even the site’s central design, a timeline that literally begins with your birth, emphasizes the notion that Facebook is forever.

• looking at Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, it looks to me that, rather than being an open Platform, FaceBook will buy/build a constellations of apps that with specialized functions or focus on subsets of your wider Social Network, letting you leverage entire width/breadth of FaceBook when you want to...