Umair keep up the Facebook scepticism.
Worth thinking about.
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3 comments:
This is one of the reasons why I'm staying off FB, and why I'm going off web2.0 generally perhaps. Their "platform" is not the technology - it's the people, the connections that already exist in the real world. "Success", in a business sense, depends on commodifying friendship. In order for FB to "win", social life has to "sell out" to them.
This is in contrast to other platforms where it's the technology that acts as the pulling point for community developers (have just read this article on game modders, for instance). FB needs more functionality to maintain that "critical mass" of attention.
From a personal POV, that functionality means either replacing or capturing non-commodified social interaction - something I don't mind pandering too, but only in certain contexts. Facebook, however, has no "context" to speak of - it is generic.
From a business POV, things are problematic because Facebook: the company *is* Facebook: the product. The article above notes that games take years to develop, but may only have a shelf-life of weeks, especially so if no community forms around them. Hence, sequels and licensing emerge as the primary forms of getting some economy of scale, but at the end of the day, they just fill the (large) gaps between jumps in technology.
Facebook now faces the challenge of leaping *upwards*, from being a single product, to a manufacturer or products once everyone moves on to the next thing. Friends Reunited had the same thing and moved to capture housemates, ex's, military forces, etc. They're still there, but have nowhere near the amount of publicity that's needed for a service that relies on network feedback...
A follow-up that just hit slashdot...
Metaplace - a virtual world toolkit.
Good point about Facebook "enclosing" existing social networks. Although I'm not sure you could characterize IRL social networks as "public goods" exactly.
But they are competing with meatspace social behaviours which have to lose out for Facebook to win. OTOH, they're also competing with already commodified social interactions if, for example, they're competing with TV watching, gossip mag buying etc.
I think facebook have seen "opening up their platform to 3rd party developers" as the answer to "what to do when the novelty wears off". The business model has got to be "sell advertising tied to rich demographic analysis" (which is why FB applications like Socialistics are interesting )
I certainly don't think they're in danger of "blowing it" like Friendster or Friends Reunited. (Or as some people suggest, MySpace are.)
Friendster went wrong because they stopped people doing stuff they wanted to. Friends Reunited never took off because they tried to milk the cash-cow aspects of it by charging up-front, rather than growing more services. If MySpace fall, it's because they've also resisted people trying to put widgets on their service rather than encouraged it.
Fb seem pretty clued-in to avoid these kinds of mistakes at the moment.
The things most people are complaining about : Fb being "evil" or trying to own the user's network, is a bit of a problem. But not as much as the critics think.
In fact, what really holds Fb back is something Danah Boyd has been pointing out. (And Dave Winer to a lesser extent.) That, if you want to capture more of the offline social networks you have to give people a far richer way of articulating their relationships and partitioning their social networks. IRL there are lots of people we like and want to spend time with, but wouldn't necessarily invite to the same party; nor do we show them the same side of ourselves.
At the moment, the big problem with FB is that I show the same news feed and the membership of the same groups and the same photos and the same installed applications to all my friends. So I have to stick with the blandest common denominator revelations about myself, the ones that won't make me look bad or confuse any of my friends or family. For FB to become a more serious medium of social interaction and to acquire more potent applications, it has to give me control and win my trust that it is capable of protecting me.
So, ironically, it's not the lack of openness that's the issue, but the lack of giving me control over the closedness.
BTW : it may be my prejudice, but don't see what the excitement is over Metaplace. How is it different from VRML?
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