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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.
Comment by Will — July 24, 2007 @ 6:05 am