Is Apple working on a social network that forgets?

by Thos003

Why I think Apple is Building An Ad Hoc Social Network
[Via Cult of Mac]

Steve Jobs was a Buddhist, a religion founded on the concept of the impermanence of all things.

And everything is impermanent. Especially Apple products.

A lot of users complain about Apple’s everything-is-temporary philosophy. But I think Apple will increasingly embrace it — and even launch a social network whose main feature is the deletion of your posts. 

The Impermanence of All iThings

Apple has traditionally set itself apart from rivals in its enthusiasm for abandoning old things in favor of new ones. During the PC era, Microsoft competed by making Windows backward-compatible with everything, all the way back to DOS, while Apple simply cleaned house with major new revs of its OS — providing backward compatibility with nothing.

It has always required a Zen-like sense of detachment to be an Apple customer.

This tendency continues. The biggest complaints users and pundits leveled against Apple about the most recent announcements were that the new iMac has no optical drive and that the new iPads and iPhone use a new connector that makes your old connectors, docks and other devices no longer usable, at least without a clunky adaptor.

Apple’s response? All that stuff you invested in — the optical discs, the connectors — is yesterday’s trash. Get rid of it and start over!

[More]

An interesting hypothesis. Most people use social networks like Twitter and Facebook for short-term instantaneous uses. What’s my status? Oh,look at this picture. What she just said.

Few care or even want archiving of their message. The only ones that do are Facebook and Twitter. They can mine that data for their own purposes.

So Apple could come out and say “We have a social network where YOU decide how long anything sticks around. We don’t care about mining your data. This network is for you to do what you want. It can’t be used to hurt you.”

One of the old saws is that if you are not paying, you are not the customer. Apple historically has made people pay with higher prices. So it has laser focus on its users as customers.

This would be a nice added benefit for paying the Apple tax. It could work and if it did, it might make Facebook wish they had supported Ping instead of trying to kill it.