ashley ([info]ashleyisachild) wrote,
@ 2007-08-28 23:40:00
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Am I excited about Facebook? I'm excited about Facebook.
A friend said to (via a Facebook message, ironically):

I think honestly when they opened up all the new applications, basically Facebook and MySpace became somewhat the same. But eh, people can do whatever they please I guess.

My response:

I say this with the utmost feelings of admiration toward my company: You totally underestimate the utility of fb's platform. To be fair, tons of users have muddied up their profiles by adding all kinds of crap like fortune cookie, horoscope... glitter text, etc. But those useless fads are only temporarily obscuring the more useful tools that the platform has allowed to come into being, such as iLike (which shows you which of your favorite bands are coming to town), Scrabulous (lets you play scrabble with ANYONE), TextMe (lets someone send you a text message from a box in your profile), and Causes (which lets you tout and share which charities you're into and get friends to join WAY more easily than you would by promoting a charity in any other way, and gets more people to donate because the payment process could be completed by a monkey... and it displays the top 5 donors and recruiters for each "cause" which helps the cause spread like a virus).

Basically, MySpace lets you connect with other users by putting a more elaborate image of yourself out there, by personalizing and tweaking every little iota of your profile page, while Facebook lets you connect with other users by making every possible avenue of electronic communication available between your Facebook profile and the world. MySpace gives 3rd party developers access to the profile of the user who has added their widget. Facebook gives 3rd party developers access to the entire graph of connections.

I have no doubt that fb platform will be basically the first real web-based "operating system" and will more or less own social internet communications within 5 years.


I should append this by saying: no, I don't think I was exaggerating.

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[info]agnoster
2007-08-29 07:33 am UTC (link)
I should append this by saying: no, I don't think I was exaggerating.

And that's kind of what scares me. Microsoft's monopoly is bad enough - we don't need another monopoly on the web. Facebook is a cool application and all, but you know what they say about power corrupting...

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SPOF
[info]anotherthink
2007-08-29 11:02 am UTC (link)
you're worried about Facebook's potential web monopoly? I'm a little more worried about the company that has (and data-mines!) all my email, chat, search history, and a lot of documents for work.

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Re: SPOF
[info]agnoster
2007-08-29 04:21 pm UTC (link)
Well, Facebook was the topic of conversation. I never said I wan't scared by other things - this is just kind of the immediate one. Plus, it emphasizes lock-in more heavily. Switching search engines is nearly zero cost. Switching email is doable, because email is an open standard on which all providers agree and interoperate. Ditto for jabber-based chat. In many ways, Google is fairly un-evil here: they almost always let you get any data out you want. Facebook used to have CSV export, waaaay back when... then they closed up. And no, the APIs don't cut it.

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[info]cataplum
2007-08-29 03:42 pm UTC (link)
I would draw a distinction between monopoly and predominance. When it comes to social networking, the network-effect nature of the beast virtually requires that one, or at most two, sites be the center of the huge majority of traffic. And I'm really not very afraid of abuse. The short history of social networking has shown that, as much of a pain in the ass as it is to start anew on yet another SNS, users are very willing to jump ship if they're not enjoying the experience. (Friendster, anyone?)

Perhaps I should pose this as a question. Yitz, how would you like the social networking space to look? Fragmented?

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[info]agnoster
2007-08-29 04:06 pm UTC (link)
Absolutely. Fragmented, not the way it is today, but the way email is. Back in the day, you had to have compuserve to "email" other compuserve people. AOL initially had a similar set-up. Eventually, portability and interoperability won out because the space was fragmented among many players who had enough to gain by working together and begrudgingly giving the customer choice.

Take GTalk and LJTalk - they both use Jabber, which allows them to interoperate. You can sign into LJTalk and message a friend using GTalk, or some other Jabber provider. Yahoo Messenger, MSN and AIM have yet to openly support Jabber bridges to their service, because they're entrenched, fairly dominant (in their respective markets) players.

[info]brad (of LiveJournal fame) has written extensively about social network portability. Perhaps Facebook will do the right thing - the move to open up APIs could be construed as promising, although it looks like it's more designed to create even greater dependence on Facebook than ever before.

Anyway, in short what I'd want the social networking space to look like is: whether I use Facebook or MySpace or whatever, my data (profile and friends) are not locked into the provider. APIs are great, but they're only part of the solution. As far as Facebook's concerned, I don't own my friends list: Facebook does. And as they're getting more and more applications and users dependent on that service, they become more and more entrenched, to the point where I could see what Ashley claims being the case - but I don't see that as a good thing.

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[info]cataplum
2007-08-29 04:21 pm UTC (link)
Hm, interesting. I understand very well the benefit to consumers of portability -- heck, Google's been doing it's best on that front, seeing as we don't hold your Gmail captive, etc. But what's the business case for interoperability?

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[info]agnoster
2007-08-29 05:06 pm UTC (link)
The business case for interoperability is two-fold:

1) It's a concrete sell to the user - at least the savvy ones - to not have lock-in. Google knows this. Doing things the non-evil way curries favor, especially from people who are influential in the tech community.

2) For non-monopolies, it increases the value of your offering. Imagine someone offering an email service where you can't send or receive email except to other users of the service! That's how it used to be - but enough of the smaller players adopted open standards that it eventually became necessary to adopt.

In other words, once the standards are developed we can expect to see all the second-tier social networks adopting them, since they all stand to gain vs. Facebook and MySpace by co-operating. With enough momentum, even the big players would eventually have to co-operate. In the instant messaging space today, I expect it won't be long before one of the big three services see enough of an advantage to being able to interoperate with GTalk et al. that they switch - and then it's going to be very hard for the remaining services to stay closed. It happened with email, it's (slowly) happening with IM, and I think it'll have to happen for social networks, too - or we all lose.

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[info]drewmg
2007-08-29 11:28 am UTC (link)
i agree. myspace is the scourge of the internet. facebook has gotten a LITTLE worse with some of these applications, but it's still a far better user experience.

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[info]c404
2007-08-30 05:15 pm UTC (link)
I agree wholeheartedly, BUT they will have to stay ahead of the curve as worthy competitors appear. They may or may not be ready to do that. By doing what they've already done they've proven they can innovate though.

They need to stop making everyone's profile private by default! Some of us don't want an account.

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[info]c404
2007-08-30 05:16 pm UTC (link)
I guess I just articulated beautifully why they are always going to make everyone's profile private by default.

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