Fostering community is a fragile process. Google simply stepped in the brown stinky stuff far too often. The initial beta, the public release (too soon), the lack of features (no search ... from the Internet's leading search company?). Some huge reorientations of direction. A miserable client experience (it's a hugely bloated web page, and I still can't do more than a trivial amount on it).

Real Names, the SEO takeover, and the YouTube Anschluss were really only the icing on the cake.

The first drove me to kill my personally ascribed account and create one under this nym which I use in a few places online. The second largely dismayed me. Things looked up briefly a year or so back as search got more powerful and enough interesting content had accumulated to provide some actual utility to the site. Last May's redesign, the War on Words, and the YouTube Anschluss were all pretty awful.

I think that is really smart and makes a lot of sense. Facebook started out by servicing a niche, Twitter was used by tech nerds.

As much as I detest virtually everything Facebook, it's growth strategy from Harvard to Ivies to selective edus to all was great. From the get-go, it was the place to go to find a crowd more exclusive than the one you were in already.

That ended with mass-market availability, but it's provided steam to roll on for a while.

Google had an initial base which was, I think, the seed around which it could have grown a community but blew it by releasing publicly too early.

Among other failings.

Twitter took off once it got a critical mass of celebrities using it, and this fact was published in mainstream media. Stephen Fry brought in a lot of people; now it's Justin Bieber.