Profits in Tiny Online Nigerian Communities
As we move into the era of Internet 3.0 which is going to be massively distributed, one of the things I would expect is that big Internet portals like Facebook could begin to lose appeal. If the world is run distributively, it means the needs for people to organize and share would be highly localized. While the benefits of network effects and inversibility construct would remain, they would be at those local levels.
This would be the trajectory but it is not clear how that would happen. Network effects would remain strong, I repeat, but many things would change.
While there is no correlation and for entirely different reasons, Uganda's telecommunications regulator, the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) will launch its versions of Twitter and Facebook this year for the citizens. According to the executive director, Eng. Godfrey Mutabazi , the plan is to save cost. It may be but expect such actions in near future. I do think Internet would be re-wired as this evolution takes shape.
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In a very long piece, by Verge, some Americans are showing the same signs - they want things to be tiny and local when it comes to online communities
This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.
This Internet 3.0 could offer massive opportunities at local levels. Yes, the one-size fits all model of today's Internet 2.0 will give way for something possibly better. China has always built for this – local – and Uganda wants to give it a try.
You may be the one that gives Nigeria its own Facebook, Twitter and yes LinkedIn. That is a possibility for the future, if distributed Internet systems arrive at scale, making centralization largely irrelevant. Of course, do not assume that today's Internet 2.0 leaders cannot transmute to also become those local leaders. But that will happen if the locals are spectators.
