Facebook is a scary beast
Oh facebook. I think nothing really beats it when it comes to hype in the blogosphere, except for (you guessed it) the iPhone. Everybody keeps talking about how Facebook is the next Microsoft, the next Google or the next IBM – and while I have been absorbed by the beast, I can’t help but question those claims, and be a little worried.
Debunking the Facebook glories
Let’s get it out of the way now – it’s a spruced up contact list / social network. The API and applications do give it a lot of flare, but being totally honest, it’s not going to give me much more than a list of friends a a series of metachunks (did I just coin this?) about them.
Interesting, yes. But where’s the real marketable value? Sure, it’s aggregating all sorts of information about people, what they do, and what their friends do – there’s tremendous potential when it comes to advertising. But it’s closed data – it’s a silo. A walled garden – albeit a small wall, considering the apps.
Linked-in killer, MySpace-killer, what?
Facebook is good for what it is – an aggregator of people data. As such, it’s not going to kill Linked-In as a place for people to use their network to tap into the job market. Or ever stop kids from signing up for MySpace to check-up on their favorite artists. Facebook doesn’t kill much except for its own users’ time – which isn’t bad at all.
Now, Facebook could easily evolve into a competitor against Linked-in, particularly because it already does have the same audience – but should it? My personal opinion is that it wont, but I guess we’ll see.
It does have its merits
Facebook does strike me as genius for one thing, though – being the first social network with no one specific social object (something I initially talked about back in 2005), but being completely flexible about it.
Social object is the main thing the social network is about. Flickr has photos, Last.fm has music, 43Things has activities, Twitter has social statuses.
Through the facebook API, they’ve managed to allow external developers to inject any social object into Facebook. A few examples would be the applications to track movie tastes, music tastes, photos, etc. Now that is smart – I’ll go as far as saying Facebook wouldn’t be 1% as interesting if it wasn’t for that.
In conclusion: Facebook is great for what it is, but fails by being a semi-closed system – you can’t get your data out. It locks you in. I don’t think any social network is tackling the lock-in problem properly, and I suspect there may be considerable gains to the one that does first. If networks make it easy for me to leave and take my data with me, I’ll stay – heck, that’s why I’m using Flickr and Last.fm.
As a college student, I miss the old facebook. It was a privelage to incoming high schoolers to get their university email addresses and get to join. I remember when I got out, it’s all anyone talked about. I took two years to actually join the trend, and ran into friends from as early as middle school. For blunt straight forward contact with friends it was a great system.
Then it started to takeover the social aspects of life around me. The phone would stop ringing, the party invites were not flyers anymore, and relationships were not real until the status on facebook had been updated. The amount of power it had gained in those two years was scary.
All of this, followed by the slow expansion. Next came the applications which the blogosphere was eating up. I personally find the applications system intrusive into the aspects I knew and loved about facebook. It’s growth was at a scary rate, good for them, but bad for us.
Lots of criticism in the college level. Well, I shouldn’t say lots…but I go to journalism school and we have frequent discussions about it, the information they have collected and have power over.
I even tried to delete my account once, when I noticed friends parents getting on there, now even my step mom has an account. The account doesn’t even delete though. It just goes inactive, so all of your information is still there.
I can’t say I am the biggest fan of the direction it’s taking, but I’ve been there since the beginning so it’s a bit much to take in.
I LOVE facebook… For a weird reason. Facebook is the ONLY online tool that pretty much EVERYONE I know is comfortable using. Most people think the ability to network online is a recent revolution.
We make web software (www.planhq.com). Sometimes, it is hard convincing people to use the internet, now Facebook is helping people rave about web software.
baby steps!
Hey Fred, I wrote up some comments on my site about the recent TechCrunch article (Could Facebook become the next Microsoft?) – see: http://www.mattrobin.com/article/34/facebook-the-next-microsoft
I think we both agree that the suggestion that Facebook could be the next [insert name of global software giant!] is sort of…well, a bit too crazy.
Right? I like that you’ve acknowledged Facebook’s strengths too.
[...] Webreakstuff » Facebook is a scary beast [...]
Will – checkout: http://duggmirror.com//tech_news/2504_steps_to_closing_your_Facebook_account/plain.html
I have to say I completely agree with this “Social object is the main thing the social network is about. Flickr has photos, Last.fm has music, 43Things has activities, Twitter has social statuses.”
Just because “everyone” is on it, doesn’t mean I need to be. Thats why I’m using flickr & last.fm
I’m a relatively new user to Facebook at 3-4 months and while I empathise with Will, it is great to be a part of the fun even if I’m a bit late to the party.
Facebook has provided a great place to have quick dialogue with indviduals and groups of individuals outside of email. As form of interpersonal and group communication this seems to be a good thing.
The addition of all the applications is a love hate thing for me. I love it that I can quickly spread the word about something important to me or my group, and that we can all vote and see results on our favorite topics, amongst some other pluses. But seeing advertisements disguised as apps, particularly when they have no real functionality apart from taking you outside of FB to fill out a form is completely distasteful. If the app is going to be in Fb it needs a communication or assistance function.
This won’t be the case, however. Thousands of companies will start pummeling Facebook with ‘appli-spam’. However, I doubt that Facebook, given it’s communication restraints will ever get completely spattered with garbage like MySpace. Be thankful for that.
sorry fred… have to completely disagree with you on this one.
walled garden or no, there are 3 reasons Facebook Platform kicks ass:
1) the app dev infrastructure on Facebook is pretty darn good, and makes it very very easy to develop & deploy apps
2) the social graph gives you a ton of info via the Facebook API you can’t get anywhere else (at least until MySpace or LinkedIn have an API), &
3) the distribution opportunities via the FB newsfeed & messaging environment are tremendous, and are currently unparalleled
furthermore, FB is *not* a walled garden, since the API is actually accessible outside the FB network as well. FB authentication on normal websites is an accessible service that provides a ready-to-go identity system usable pretty much anywhere. this was available *before* the Platform launch, and is still accessible. it uses a proprietary identity & hosting system, but that’s no different than Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. ‘open’ is as open does.
my thoughts on these topics are laid out in further gory detail in this post & comment & several others:
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/07/kottke-is-wrong.html#comment-76563560
regards,
- dave mcclure
[...] avec le lien précédent… certains blogueurs ont une vision différente de Facebook… qui ne me laisse pas indifférent À [...]
[...] month and a half ago I wrote a post called “Facebook is a scary beast” and highlighted how despite the flexibility in its API and the (only) apparent openness, it [...]