Let me go down the list of some kinds of startup companies from Start-Up 100 and why they're stupid.
Advertising and Marketing
Right off the bat, a bunch of useless bullshit. I don't ever WANT to see an advertisement or marketing. I want to be able to find that shit if i'm looking for it, but I don't want any of it to just show up somewhere.
Audio and Media
More stupid "web 2.0" websites based around music and other crap. Internet radio has existed for well over a decade. I don't need another place to not find the music I want to hear. (Pandora sucks, Spotify sucks, Grooveshark sucks... it all sucks. I'll turn on Shoutcast or Last.FM Radio if I want random music that I kind of like)
Education, Recruitment and Jobs
First of all, if you didn't get a normal education, some web 2.0 shell of a company probably isn't going to educate you any better. We have Dice and Monster, and people who are competent at what they do will network and find jobs in person like normal.
Enterprise: Security, Storage, Collaboration, Databases
Finally, startups intended for technology. Too bad all of them suck. Most people i've seen who try to develop startups have not worked very long in tech so they design or implement poorly and if they survive it's from sheer luck. Most of these solutions are crap or unnecessary.
Finance, Payments and Ecommerce
Again, i'm pretty sure all the big contenders have already been created. It'd be interesting if they actually had a new way to deal with finance or ecommerce, but most of it's been done and there's not a lot of room for innovation.
Gaming, Virtual Worlds
Ok, here's something that actually has promise. Make a stupid game which is addicting and make a billion dollars like Rovio.
Social Networking and Collaboration
JUST. LET. IT. DIE.
Social networking is a fad. You know what the original social network was? AOL. Just let the shit die. God I hate social networks.
Travel and Transport
I guess there's still a few niche/boutique businesses you could start in this space. But if it's another "how to look up cheap flights" website, just kill yourself.
What I would like to see more of are startups that are intended on bettering mankind, or fixing a common problem, or pioneering a new technology (a *real* new technology, not just a new shitty website or NoSQL garbage tool nobody wants). Medical device startups are really cool. Startups that develop technology for the 3rd world are cool. I'm still waiting on somebody to build a company that just services new companies, giving them turn-key solutions to build new networks and support them. I'll go work for them.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Saturday, October 8, 2011
note to self for change management system
if a hack like extra privs is applied to a system to allow a dev to fix some issue in production or something, should be a system in place to automatically revoke privs after a given time. or specify a date/time range that the privs should be added, so you can specify "during maintenance window sunday 5am-9am developer Steve gets weblogic sudo access". as a matter of principle, all changes should be allowed to have date ranges applied to control when the changes happen. if the date/time starts but has no end, assume end time is indefinite. if start time and end time are the same, change is only applied once.
all account access should have defined end dates (for example, contractor steve has a 6 month contract, so all his access should have an expiry time set). BEFORE access is revoked email alerts will be generated for 2 weeks out, 1 week out, 3 days out, 1 day out before access expires to alert somebody before his access goes out the window. most configuration should not have expiry times because it's assumed if it is in config management it's meant to be there indefinitely, but for quick hacks where we know we don't want it to be there long we can set expiry times and will get alerts before it expires.
all account access should have defined end dates (for example, contractor steve has a 6 month contract, so all his access should have an expiry time set). BEFORE access is revoked email alerts will be generated for 2 weeks out, 1 week out, 3 days out, 1 day out before access expires to alert somebody before his access goes out the window. most configuration should not have expiry times because it's assumed if it is in config management it's meant to be there indefinitely, but for quick hacks where we know we don't want it to be there long we can set expiry times and will get alerts before it expires.
Monday, September 26, 2011
dumb network policies and systems practices
"jump server". just the term itself conjures up an image of "getting around" security or the network. it's a HACK. unless there's a big problem with your network, you should be able to allow access directly to the server you need to get to. connecting to one host just to connect to another host is retarded.
the only thing that is a potential benefit is that you're essentially forcing any network communication through one protocol (which can subsequently be circumvented on the jump server, depending) and (again, depending on the jump server) authenticating twice.
the bad things? it's incredibly, incredibly slow to transfer files. functionality with different protocols becomes broken. and you're circumventing the firewalls and network security. once you tunnel to the jump box it becomes much more difficult to determine who is connecting to where (after the jump box). and attacks on the internal network get much more interesting, not to mention if you escalate privs on the jump box you can piggyback any connection any other user is making from the jump box. not to mention you're forcing a new layer of complication onto your users so doing their job becomes more of a hassle - which almost by definition inspires people to break good convention for the sake of convenience. not to mention it's a waste of resources.
systems guys, don't jerk your users around. if there's a way you can get something done quicker, do it. for example: resizing logical partitions in a VM guest.
if your user wants 10GB more added to their work partition, get a procedure in place so you can do it live. rebooting the server should not be necessary for most admin tasks on a unix host.
don't believe me? read this blog post explaining how to extend an LVM volume while the box is still up. hey, now i don't have to wait a day to keep doing my work on a server which was allocated way fewer resources than it should have had!
the only thing that is a potential benefit is that you're essentially forcing any network communication through one protocol (which can subsequently be circumvented on the jump server, depending) and (again, depending on the jump server) authenticating twice.
the bad things? it's incredibly, incredibly slow to transfer files. functionality with different protocols becomes broken. and you're circumventing the firewalls and network security. once you tunnel to the jump box it becomes much more difficult to determine who is connecting to where (after the jump box). and attacks on the internal network get much more interesting, not to mention if you escalate privs on the jump box you can piggyback any connection any other user is making from the jump box. not to mention you're forcing a new layer of complication onto your users so doing their job becomes more of a hassle - which almost by definition inspires people to break good convention for the sake of convenience. not to mention it's a waste of resources.
systems guys, don't jerk your users around. if there's a way you can get something done quicker, do it. for example: resizing logical partitions in a VM guest.
if your user wants 10GB more added to their work partition, get a procedure in place so you can do it live. rebooting the server should not be necessary for most admin tasks on a unix host.
don't believe me? read this blog post explaining how to extend an LVM volume while the box is still up. hey, now i don't have to wait a day to keep doing my work on a server which was allocated way fewer resources than it should have had!
Monday, September 19, 2011
secure kickstarting of new linux servers
PXE is not secure. Not only does it rely on broadcast requests for a PXE server, it uses UDP and TFTP to serve files, thus removing any remaining security features. It also can't be used on WANs and typically requires admin infrastructure and VLANs set up wherever the boxes will be installed, so lots of admin overhead is required.
To get around these problems and provide a secure mechanism for remote install you should use a pre-built linux image on CD-ROM or floppy disk. Most servers today come with one or the other, and both provide enough space to include a kernel and tiny compressed initrd with barebones networking tools.
The kernel should obviously be the newest vanilla kernel possible, patched to include any relevant hardware support. The more vanilla the better as you can quickly pick up the newest released kernel and build it without needing to modify vendor-specific patches.
The initrd should probably be based on an LZMA-compressed mini filesystem or cpio archive. Usually something custom like squashfs works the best. You'll need to build busybox and the dropbear ssh client in a uClibc buildroot environment to make it as small as possible. Bundle an ssh key for the admin server along with DNS and IP information for the server (in case DNS resolution fails, it can try the last known good IP address(es)). It should try indefinitely to get an IP address, and once it gets one it should make an SSH connection. Once SSH connection is established it should download install scripts and execute them. All downloads happen through the secure SSH tunnel.
The initrd should also include proxytunnel and potentially openvpn or another UDP-based SSL tunnel so it can fall back to trying to connect through HTTP or udp port 53. You may need cntlm to work with NTLM proxies as proxytunnel's support does not seem to work for all versions of NTLM. Also, rsync should probably be included, or downloaded immediately once a network connection is established. Big apps can always be downloaded to a tmpfs partition later once the SSH connection is established. The initrd should also use a bootloader that can pass custom arguments to the initrd at boot time, for example to specify proxy or IP settings. It should probably support Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol for corporate environments.
If you have room, you may also want to bundle grub with the initrd. This can help you recover a system if it fails and it will allow you to install grub over whatever's currently on the hard drive. A good grub configuration to install would include options to boot from hard drive, CDROM or floppy, so as long as you have remote console you can reboot the box and select the install image from grub at boot time without needing to change BIOS settings.
Finally, each client image should be modified before burning/imaging to have custom ssh keys. You want each boot image to be able to be revoked from the admin server's login list, in case a boot image/disk is compromised or stolen. Granted, you're not giving this thing any more rights than access to your kickstart file tree, and that shouldn't have anything super confidential on it anyway. To customize the ssh keys per image you can have a script which generates new images, creates keys for each one and renames the image file to something specific to the machine. Match up the specific piece of hardware with this unique image file in your network's inventory database.
The kickstart server should have IP addresses dedicated only for the kickstart clients. An HTTP reverse proxy should be installed for ports 80 and 443 so that the client can use proxytunnel to connect to SSH through HTTP proxies. Optionally an openvpn daemon should be enabled on port 53 in case a client's firewall has an open outbound port 53. Each kickstart server's SSH daemon (listening only on the kickstart IPs) should use the same host keys so they can be copied to the initrd and you won't have to worry about the server host keys changing per box, messing up the initial connection from the clients. You could manage all the kickstart host keys independently but why complicate matters further?
In the end what you have is a client install CD or floppy which can boot up on a network, connect securely to a remote server, configure itself and follow setup instructions given by the remote server. It can even deliver detailed information about the host on boot-up so it can then download instructions specific to the machine type. When the machine boots up for the first time, select the CDROM or floppy and run it; as it boots it can install grub on the hard drive so you never even have to change the BIOS boot order. I recommend having the initrd grub config default to boot from hard disk; you can always manually select the remote install function and it's safer to default to booting from hard disk if the CD or floppy will stay in the machine.
Yes, this is a lot more maintenance than a simple PXE server. This is not intended for use in all environments. But if you need a truly secure, remote-accessible machine kickstarting solution, this one will do the job across all kinds of network types.
P.S. You can substitute ssh for a minimal HTTPS client and a copy of the server's certificate on the initrd so you don't have to rely on CAs. I personally don't trust 3rd party certificate authorities (as more and more evidence shows that states can snoop on SSL traffic without problems).
To get around these problems and provide a secure mechanism for remote install you should use a pre-built linux image on CD-ROM or floppy disk. Most servers today come with one or the other, and both provide enough space to include a kernel and tiny compressed initrd with barebones networking tools.
The kernel should obviously be the newest vanilla kernel possible, patched to include any relevant hardware support. The more vanilla the better as you can quickly pick up the newest released kernel and build it without needing to modify vendor-specific patches.
The initrd should probably be based on an LZMA-compressed mini filesystem or cpio archive. Usually something custom like squashfs works the best. You'll need to build busybox and the dropbear ssh client in a uClibc buildroot environment to make it as small as possible. Bundle an ssh key for the admin server along with DNS and IP information for the server (in case DNS resolution fails, it can try the last known good IP address(es)). It should try indefinitely to get an IP address, and once it gets one it should make an SSH connection. Once SSH connection is established it should download install scripts and execute them. All downloads happen through the secure SSH tunnel.
The initrd should also include proxytunnel and potentially openvpn or another UDP-based SSL tunnel so it can fall back to trying to connect through HTTP or udp port 53. You may need cntlm to work with NTLM proxies as proxytunnel's support does not seem to work for all versions of NTLM. Also, rsync should probably be included, or downloaded immediately once a network connection is established. Big apps can always be downloaded to a tmpfs partition later once the SSH connection is established. The initrd should also use a bootloader that can pass custom arguments to the initrd at boot time, for example to specify proxy or IP settings. It should probably support Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol for corporate environments.
If you have room, you may also want to bundle grub with the initrd. This can help you recover a system if it fails and it will allow you to install grub over whatever's currently on the hard drive. A good grub configuration to install would include options to boot from hard drive, CDROM or floppy, so as long as you have remote console you can reboot the box and select the install image from grub at boot time without needing to change BIOS settings.
Finally, each client image should be modified before burning/imaging to have custom ssh keys. You want each boot image to be able to be revoked from the admin server's login list, in case a boot image/disk is compromised or stolen. Granted, you're not giving this thing any more rights than access to your kickstart file tree, and that shouldn't have anything super confidential on it anyway. To customize the ssh keys per image you can have a script which generates new images, creates keys for each one and renames the image file to something specific to the machine. Match up the specific piece of hardware with this unique image file in your network's inventory database.
The kickstart server should have IP addresses dedicated only for the kickstart clients. An HTTP reverse proxy should be installed for ports 80 and 443 so that the client can use proxytunnel to connect to SSH through HTTP proxies. Optionally an openvpn daemon should be enabled on port 53 in case a client's firewall has an open outbound port 53. Each kickstart server's SSH daemon (listening only on the kickstart IPs) should use the same host keys so they can be copied to the initrd and you won't have to worry about the server host keys changing per box, messing up the initial connection from the clients. You could manage all the kickstart host keys independently but why complicate matters further?
In the end what you have is a client install CD or floppy which can boot up on a network, connect securely to a remote server, configure itself and follow setup instructions given by the remote server. It can even deliver detailed information about the host on boot-up so it can then download instructions specific to the machine type. When the machine boots up for the first time, select the CDROM or floppy and run it; as it boots it can install grub on the hard drive so you never even have to change the BIOS boot order. I recommend having the initrd grub config default to boot from hard disk; you can always manually select the remote install function and it's safer to default to booting from hard disk if the CD or floppy will stay in the machine.
Yes, this is a lot more maintenance than a simple PXE server. This is not intended for use in all environments. But if you need a truly secure, remote-accessible machine kickstarting solution, this one will do the job across all kinds of network types.
P.S. You can substitute ssh for a minimal HTTPS client and a copy of the server's certificate on the initrd so you don't have to rely on CAs. I personally don't trust 3rd party certificate authorities (as more and more evidence shows that states can snoop on SSL traffic without problems).
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
A tip for handling long downtime
So you push out a piece of code and it eats your live database. The site is broken. You need to take it down to repair the database. So you're going to keep your site down for how long? 30 minutes? 6 hours?
If you're trying to "fix" a database and you're keeping your site down until it's done, get a read-only copy of an old snapshot of the database + site code up. Put up a banner on all pages saying the site is under emergency maintenance so parts of the site are temporarily disabled.
This way your users get to continue using at least the read-only parts of the site and not all of your traffic goes out the window. Keep this in mind when developing the site too; not being able to update a hit counter in the database for a specific page should be a soft error, for example.
If you don't have a place to host this temporary database + site code, think about having such a place. Secondary/failover hosts would work at a time like this, or maybe your single host(s) need more capacity.
If you're trying to "fix" a database and you're keeping your site down until it's done, get a read-only copy of an old snapshot of the database + site code up. Put up a banner on all pages saying the site is under emergency maintenance so parts of the site are temporarily disabled.
This way your users get to continue using at least the read-only parts of the site and not all of your traffic goes out the window. Keep this in mind when developing the site too; not being able to update a hit counter in the database for a specific page should be a soft error, for example.
If you don't have a place to host this temporary database + site code, think about having such a place. Secondary/failover hosts would work at a time like this, or maybe your single host(s) need more capacity.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
the internet is a collective waste of potential
What really makes me sick about the industry I work in (IT) is how a great majority of the really smart, creative people in it are working on the biggest wastes of time, money and energy on the planet.
Right now, somewhere in the Bay Area, someone is building a tool. In that tool is invested hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of dollars of resources in human beings' time and the purchase of things to support them. Energy is being expended and people are spending their lives working on this tool. People spent years going to school to amass the knowledge to perform the tasks necessary to complete this tool.
That tool will be used to put funny phrases under pictures of cats on the internet.
Meanwhile, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, up to 11 million people may starve to death because they don't have food. When food prices soar (for example, when the USA meddles in food prices to achieve lower cost at the gas pump) and rivers are dry from drought, it hits the poorest the hardest. People's lives are lost as a result.
I'm not someone who fights for causes. I'm as hypocritical, cynical and lazy as most [American] people out there. But I get sick at the thought of the sheer staggering size of waste that is the internet and the big business taking advantage of it. There's untold fortunes of wealth being used to build digital empires who collectively do nothing to help any one or any thing. Sure, facebook creates this big website and eventually people can use it to create an event to rally protesters to a cause. But this was an unintended side-effect, and the end result from such "socializing" is (my guess anyway) ineffective. And before you claim that Facebook is the reason a government is overthrown somewhere in the middle east, please think long and hard about that. Revolution is the domain of people wanting to change something and deciding en masse to put their lives on the line for personal and political freedom. Facebook is the equivalent of a text-based telephone. Do you really think revolution couldn't have happened without a telephone?
My disgust at the waste of potential comes from my experiences in the Open Source community. I noticed how I could spend all my free time working on some cool new toy, only for there to be no real purpose to it. It would languish and if I finished it, nobody would really use it. I noticed how other people tended to spend their time on projects which were fun but produced nothing of value. So I stopped working on things I didn't need. Now I look around and all I can see is wasted effort.
Hackerspaces are one huge example of a waste of resources. Here you have a collective of very smart, motivated inventors who come together - to do what? Create 'makerbots'? Send balloons into space? Build arcade cabinets? WHAT'S THE POINT? You take that same group of people together and ask them to solve something truly difficult - like ways to keep people from dying from starvation in Somalia - and you'd have a real, tangible, valuable product.
Most of the people I know who work to change the world do so in person. I think that's partially because there's more of an immediate gratification and it doesn't take much to fly to Africa and get your hands dirty. But longer-term projects to increase the sustainability of a community are valuable too. You don't have to make huge changes in your life to spend your time working on something of value. All you have to do is change your focus. Do the same job, but pick which employer and project it is based on what kind of value it can produce.
Doing this for your own gratification is a selfish and unseemly objective, to me. If you just want to make yourself feel better you can volunteer at a local homeless shelter. This isn't intended to be a decision based on morals or for some goal to fix the way things are. The goal, to me, is to take the time you spend in life doing "work" and turn it into an investment in the future of the lives of living beings. Because you can spend your time doing nothing - really, it's not hard to do absolutely nothing - or you can spend it doing something which has a positive benefit outside of yourself or the company you work for.
I mean, it's a logical choice... help only yourself, or help yourself and others at the same time. In our society we do for others all the time because doing good things is cyclical. We can eat because we pay people to create and bring us food instead of stealing it (just ask warlords; it's not a sustainable business model). We don't get murdered because we don't murder people. And we hold doors for people so they too will hold a door for us. In this way, creating something of value which provides for other people will improve society - and on a bigger scale, the world. If you figure out a way to keep people from going hungry, we don't need to spend billions on foreign aid, which strengthens our economy is stronger. It's a simplistic but effective idea.
The next time you're considering job offers or personal projects to pick up, ask what the end result of the work is. If one answer is "put funny phrases on pictures of cats", and the other is "helping people", consider the second one. It may benefit you more in the end.
Right now, somewhere in the Bay Area, someone is building a tool. In that tool is invested hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of dollars of resources in human beings' time and the purchase of things to support them. Energy is being expended and people are spending their lives working on this tool. People spent years going to school to amass the knowledge to perform the tasks necessary to complete this tool.
That tool will be used to put funny phrases under pictures of cats on the internet.
Meanwhile, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, up to 11 million people may starve to death because they don't have food. When food prices soar (for example, when the USA meddles in food prices to achieve lower cost at the gas pump) and rivers are dry from drought, it hits the poorest the hardest. People's lives are lost as a result.
I'm not someone who fights for causes. I'm as hypocritical, cynical and lazy as most [American] people out there. But I get sick at the thought of the sheer staggering size of waste that is the internet and the big business taking advantage of it. There's untold fortunes of wealth being used to build digital empires who collectively do nothing to help any one or any thing. Sure, facebook creates this big website and eventually people can use it to create an event to rally protesters to a cause. But this was an unintended side-effect, and the end result from such "socializing" is (my guess anyway) ineffective. And before you claim that Facebook is the reason a government is overthrown somewhere in the middle east, please think long and hard about that. Revolution is the domain of people wanting to change something and deciding en masse to put their lives on the line for personal and political freedom. Facebook is the equivalent of a text-based telephone. Do you really think revolution couldn't have happened without a telephone?
My disgust at the waste of potential comes from my experiences in the Open Source community. I noticed how I could spend all my free time working on some cool new toy, only for there to be no real purpose to it. It would languish and if I finished it, nobody would really use it. I noticed how other people tended to spend their time on projects which were fun but produced nothing of value. So I stopped working on things I didn't need. Now I look around and all I can see is wasted effort.
Hackerspaces are one huge example of a waste of resources. Here you have a collective of very smart, motivated inventors who come together - to do what? Create 'makerbots'? Send balloons into space? Build arcade cabinets? WHAT'S THE POINT? You take that same group of people together and ask them to solve something truly difficult - like ways to keep people from dying from starvation in Somalia - and you'd have a real, tangible, valuable product.
Most of the people I know who work to change the world do so in person. I think that's partially because there's more of an immediate gratification and it doesn't take much to fly to Africa and get your hands dirty. But longer-term projects to increase the sustainability of a community are valuable too. You don't have to make huge changes in your life to spend your time working on something of value. All you have to do is change your focus. Do the same job, but pick which employer and project it is based on what kind of value it can produce.
Doing this for your own gratification is a selfish and unseemly objective, to me. If you just want to make yourself feel better you can volunteer at a local homeless shelter. This isn't intended to be a decision based on morals or for some goal to fix the way things are. The goal, to me, is to take the time you spend in life doing "work" and turn it into an investment in the future of the lives of living beings. Because you can spend your time doing nothing - really, it's not hard to do absolutely nothing - or you can spend it doing something which has a positive benefit outside of yourself or the company you work for.
I mean, it's a logical choice... help only yourself, or help yourself and others at the same time. In our society we do for others all the time because doing good things is cyclical. We can eat because we pay people to create and bring us food instead of stealing it (just ask warlords; it's not a sustainable business model). We don't get murdered because we don't murder people. And we hold doors for people so they too will hold a door for us. In this way, creating something of value which provides for other people will improve society - and on a bigger scale, the world. If you figure out a way to keep people from going hungry, we don't need to spend billions on foreign aid, which strengthens our economy is stronger. It's a simplistic but effective idea.
The next time you're considering job offers or personal projects to pick up, ask what the end result of the work is. If one answer is "put funny phrases on pictures of cats", and the other is "helping people", consider the second one. It may benefit you more in the end.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Social Media Hoedown
Honestly. The fact that people haven't quite grasped that social media is all about fads is a little scary to me. You don't really have to a deliver a 'product' as anything other than a slick UI that allows people to play with each other. It's communication for entertainment's sake.
There is no point to using social media other than event invites, relationship status and pictures. That's the only useful features. Well, and contact information, but you've already got their contact info if they're really your friend.
I know, I know. You're going to defend your meek social interaction through comments and statuses and links and videos and all kinds of other nonsense. We've had forums for years. Some people make friends on forums but they're going to stick to the forums, not their facebook.
Google+ is just the latest reincarnation of the social media supersite. After them will be another. It doesn't matter to anyone what site they use as long as it's new and it's slicker. Why do they not care? Because there's no value in it besides the 3 things I mentioned above. As long as everyone they know is on the site, they'll use it.
So what's the killer product nobody's made yet? Quite simply it's a service that integrates every communication medium that people use. If (for example) you had a deal with every major wireless carrier to carry your apps and optimized communication through each varying protocol (SMS, SMTP, voice, HTTP, etc) to allow seamless and instant communication, there'd be no reason not to use it. If nobody ever had to sign up to a service because they were instantly and intrinsically enjoined with it there'd be nothing much else to sway one's opinion (besides Farmville). Nor would you have a choice, really.
And that's not to put down Farmville: Mindless games and apps have huge value for their market, but you don't need a social media network for that. Moreover, this seamless communication medium would allow you a framework to build apps which could reach anyone anywhere. Combine the dedicated carrier apps with a means to ship targeted "value-adding" applications and you've got one powerful, flexible social engine.
The way I see it is, all of these "sites" are based on some archaic notion that people should be using "the web" to get what it is they want. I disagree. I see every device with a network stack as simply a means to an end. The ends are basic: communication, information/entertainment and acquiring of goods/services. You can do all of those things with SMTP and POP3 if the sent and received messages are tailored for the application.
So let's unburden ourselves from the chains of some complex and limiting set of protocols and scripting languages. Nobody *needs* an app or a site. What we need are practical multifaceted interfaces to basic human interaction.
Google+ isn't going to give us that. The next site that replaces Google+ when the hoedown continues and the winds change, also won't give us that. But maybe once we've wasted enough time playing with our toys we'll finally get tired enough to just make tools that give us what we need and not always what we think we want.
There is no point to using social media other than event invites, relationship status and pictures. That's the only useful features. Well, and contact information, but you've already got their contact info if they're really your friend.
I know, I know. You're going to defend your meek social interaction through comments and statuses and links and videos and all kinds of other nonsense. We've had forums for years. Some people make friends on forums but they're going to stick to the forums, not their facebook.
Google+ is just the latest reincarnation of the social media supersite. After them will be another. It doesn't matter to anyone what site they use as long as it's new and it's slicker. Why do they not care? Because there's no value in it besides the 3 things I mentioned above. As long as everyone they know is on the site, they'll use it.
So what's the killer product nobody's made yet? Quite simply it's a service that integrates every communication medium that people use. If (for example) you had a deal with every major wireless carrier to carry your apps and optimized communication through each varying protocol (SMS, SMTP, voice, HTTP, etc) to allow seamless and instant communication, there'd be no reason not to use it. If nobody ever had to sign up to a service because they were instantly and intrinsically enjoined with it there'd be nothing much else to sway one's opinion (besides Farmville). Nor would you have a choice, really.
And that's not to put down Farmville: Mindless games and apps have huge value for their market, but you don't need a social media network for that. Moreover, this seamless communication medium would allow you a framework to build apps which could reach anyone anywhere. Combine the dedicated carrier apps with a means to ship targeted "value-adding" applications and you've got one powerful, flexible social engine.
The way I see it is, all of these "sites" are based on some archaic notion that people should be using "the web" to get what it is they want. I disagree. I see every device with a network stack as simply a means to an end. The ends are basic: communication, information/entertainment and acquiring of goods/services. You can do all of those things with SMTP and POP3 if the sent and received messages are tailored for the application.
So let's unburden ourselves from the chains of some complex and limiting set of protocols and scripting languages. Nobody *needs* an app or a site. What we need are practical multifaceted interfaces to basic human interaction.
Google+ isn't going to give us that. The next site that replaces Google+ when the hoedown continues and the winds change, also won't give us that. But maybe once we've wasted enough time playing with our toys we'll finally get tired enough to just make tools that give us what we need and not always what we think we want.
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