1. Email is broken and inundated with spam. Facebook messages are opt-in, and hence more spam-defensible. I know people who do not respond to email and only to social network messages now.

2. Google is broken. Searches now bring up links SEO-optimized by asshole marketeers, instead of relevant information. “The Internet” no longer gets you what you want, without a whole love of mining. Social networks don’t provide a direct replacement, but viral spread among friend communities replicates the kind of exponential growth we used to see on the Internet when something cool appears, and no longer do, because relevant search words are instantly hijacked by marketing dweebs.

This isn’t analogous to Geocities; it’s more analogous to Compuserve, MySpace, Facebook, and their ilk are congeries of millions of communities, not just ways to make an easy website. The problem they face is the same problem the early Internet faced; they have no viable, obvious business model. Compuserve had subscription income; the social networks are stuck with ads, at appallingly low CPMs.

Yet they provide real value to their users. and I have to believe there’s a way to capture enough of the value to make for business viability.

I think people of the future should be exposed to our old homepages, even if they can’t understand our nostalgia for “under construction” animated gifs.