Portal 2.0: The Battle of the Social Networks

摘要

ifear we are entering a new era that I'm calling "Portal 2.0." As the major social sites jockey for position, recent evidence suggests, sadly, that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are building walls around the applications in the exact same way that the Portal 1.0 players did in the late 1990s. I'm looking at you AOL, Lycos, Excite, MSN, and Yahoo!.With the summer launch of Google+, the Googleplex made clear its intention to become a major player in the social space, and both Facebook and Twitter have retrenched—taking away bits of services from the other guys and forcing consumers like me to have to go to multiple applications. Now when I want to share something (such as a link to this column online) I need to go to all three services to alert my followers.