I'm trying without luck to work up the same indignation that's accompanied Facebook's decision to block Google's Friend Connect earlier in the week.
It's become quite the big deal in the blogosphere. Mike Arrington heaped scorn on Facebook's decision while Marc Canter was equally passionate about users getting control over their personal data. (Open is the new black.)
Facebook's defense? Google Friend Connect "redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect." (CNET News.com's Dan Farber has a good recap of the blow-by-blow.)
I'm not sure how many people believe that explanation. Privacy is a convenient dodge, but this sounds more like land grab battle between the rival services. (Coincidentally, MySpace.com and Google also made separate announcements recently about creating a more open social Web.)
But here's the disconnect.
From a user perspective, who doesn't want data portability? I'm all for people taking their social graphs wherever they might like. But then there's the reality of commercial interests, which have no interest in helping rivals. The value of a network has to do with the network effect. People go to Facebook or MySpace or Orkut because other people they also know are on a particular service and they want to connect. Sharing the users' social graph means a rival can more easily catch up to the friend networks built by incumbent players such as Facebook.
They may allow just enough data portability to appear to be on the side of the angels. But in the absence of the Second Coming--or pressure to create a nonprofit host for personal data--there's little chance we can expect much more.
It's easy to get caught up in the mania but as a new O'Reilly report reminds readers, only a handful of Facebook applications ever become smash hits.
Anyone who has encountered the new oddball Facebook app du jour can attest that the novelty gets old rather fast. That's because many of the ideas are insipid time sucks. At that point, you're more likely to tune out (if you haven't already hit the delete button.) Indeed, O'Reilly notes the "tendency for individual applications to grow very quickly within the first few weeks, and then to plateau in growth after a few weeks."
Growth pattern for "falling" apps
(Credit: O'Reilly)The reasons why:
Only a very small percentage of Facebook applications have enough traffic to generate substantial advertising dollars (this was a key finding of O'Reilly Radar's original Facebook Application Platform report), and The social networking phenomena is still in its awkward (and baffling) adolescence, so few marketers can unravel the real opportunities from the hype and the hope.Anybody who spends a fair chunk of time on Facebook inevitably is going to get bombarded by goofy apps forwarded by friends. O'Reilly's research backs up the anecodotal impression that "developers are not making heavy investments in the Facebook as platform. For the most part, applications are still fairly lightweight - "fluffy" - in nature."
So for the time being, O'Reilly is land zoning Facebook more as a testing ground for promotional and marketing activity than for serious applications. On the surface, that may not sound promising for the future, but it's useful to recall that we're still in the very early innings.
It has a long ways to evolve before it will be the home of applications with more gravitas, solving meatier social networking and collaboration problems. A social graph platform, comprised of profiles, connections, sharing and access controls, groups, communication, conversation, and collaboration, can provide an environment for so much more than just playful social networking. There is yet plenty of room for innovation going forward, as social networking applications become more sophisticated, with greater investment in applications for different target communities of users - users for whom it makes sense to build tools for sharing, knowledge management, and collaboration upon a social graph.Once they figure that out, Facebook may be a more promising testbed where outside developers aim far beyond personal social networking.
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