Facebook, the platform - a nightmare.
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a few weeks now, and have finally decided to do so now that a number of posts are coming out about Facebook replacing email.
Facebook has the potential to replace a lot more than just email.
Facebook could be the next Internet platform. One built upon interconnected social networks.
How about:
- classifieds (Craigslist)
- used and new products (Ebay)
- personalized start pages (Netvibes)
- social bookmarking (del.icio.us)
- video (YouTube)
- news aggregators (Digg)
- search engines, except the one inside Facebook
That scares me. Why? Because it’s a black hole - what goes in doesn’t come out.
Data is everything. If you own it (and have a LOT of it), you have a HUGE advantage. Just look at what Amazon can do with it’s recommendations.
Social networks, because of the network effect, are winner take all markets. Move everyone to the platform, build all of the apps on top, add trust, filter out all of the crap/spam, and you’re left with an Internet sized bundle of content with nothing but good stuff.
Which is wonderful, except the lock-in part. Facebook shouldn’t own all of the data built on top of it.
Do you trust Facebook?
Ben Morgan said,
October 15, 2007 @ 8:14 am
No I do not trust facebook. As a application designer I will agree that facebook provides great freedom for creating and regulating your own data but it does it at the expense of lionizing it’s own platform. I think facebook is out there to suck up all the 21th century post-industrial information capital it can get, while placing up the a front that it is all inclusive and that it reserves all it’s rights to it’s users and developers. I think the creaters of Facebook have huge profit motives like myspace, and will ultimately suck all the developers intellectual capital. I know this is a big claim but I think it is warranted. Facebook is striving for the top platform on the basis of it’s inclusivity; everyone who invests their intellectual labor onto facebooks platform only reifies support for facebooks platform. If all the developers pulled out their labor then the platform would collapse. Why else would facebook create a clause in the developers application that prevents developers from pilot running their applications via a different host? This seems like an elaborate attempt to tie developers to facebook. In this way facebook seems to be profiting off of the all inclusivity of post-industrial capitalism itself. Facebook has no control yet all control. Because of this I can not trust facebook