Here at Purple, we’ve been trading emails back and forth the past few days about the announcements at F8 regarding Facebook’s adoption of Open Social, as well as what it means for the future of the internet (I’m too busy to link any of this, go Google it). Today’s emails focused on Chris Messina’s blog post.
I’m not sold on his rant. Below is a quick synopsis of my personal (and contrasting) opinions on his post.
As a disclaimer, I have no beef with Chris Messina, and according to others I may be apathetic and offensive when it comes to the Open web. I’m sure plenty of other open-advocate developers out there will readily disagree with me. I may be the only one in the internet who thinks this way, so IMO it’s worth sharing.
In bold are pull-quotes from Chris’ article, with my personal opinions below (if you missed it, it’s probably worth reading his blog first)
…Oh, and anyone that wanted to be part of the Google index, well they’d have to add additional metadata to their pages so that the content graph would be spic and span…
We actually do that already, and it’s what half of our marketing business is based on. Well-researched Titles, Keywords, and Descriptions are intended to help index content and determine what any given web page is about.
…Except — shucks — there’s one problem with this model: it’s evil…
It’s not evil, at least not any more evil compared to any other business model. It’s obviously a sound idea for Facebook to seek realistic ways to monetize a web product that’s been free to end-users since day one. No one twists anyone’s arm to sign up for Facebook. Since a huge portion of the world is already connected on Facebook (rather than through only basic open protocol) it just makes sense to use this as a gateway for social graphing and (realistically) connecting trends and data.
…When all likes lead to Facebook, and liking requires a Facebook account, and Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of potential and chaos — those attributes which make the technology industry so interesting and competitive…
Just like Google hoards page rank so Yahoo and Bing are screwed? No. Google is just more widely adopted, but it has its competitors. When the (global) feds need to step in and regulate an unchecked Facebook monopoly, they will. Until then, there should be no impediment to progress.
…(and not just because that provider becomes a single point of failure)….
This late in the game, this is only analogous in the same sense that a catastrophic volcano would be a “single point of failure” for humanity. If the service is widely distributed (which Facebook is) and widely adopted (which…Facebook is), it won’t be an indefinite point of failure. Facebook is larger than many tangible nations on the face of this earth, in terms of both population and revenue.
As I and others have said before, your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
If it’s open protocol, then it’s shared. It may be tangibly “owned” by Facebook, but that depends on your definition of ownership. At some point, everyone will have access. The only thing regulated on Facebook is their advertising platform that harvests this information, but that really doesn’t make them any different from Apple with their iPhone and iPad market, does it?
Thus I’m looking forward to what efforts like OpenLike might do to tip back the scales, and bring the potential and value of such simple and meaningful interactions to other social identity providers across the web.
The blind scales of some internet justice system? OpenLike, while egalitarian and altruistic in nature, will fall by the unchecked wayside because (chances are) the majority of humanity will not find an inherit interest in it. We as developers forget that for most citizens, everyone’s family linkage, photo albums, birthdate reminders, and favorite things are all uploaded and connected through Facebook. As useless as our development community seems to think it is, people still use it. It’s a slim chance that anyone outside of the “open web community” wants to be burdened with a clone feature that holds no inherit value to their personal lives, lives that are already catastrophically being consumed by this social media behemoth.
I’ve mentioned this in passing to some and I’ll mention it here: when both Facebook and world governments are linked through an open standard, your government will have unchecked access to your online identity, your wants, your “likes”, your ideas, your medical records (ahem, government regulations on health care) and all of your distributable digital content.
You think things are weird now? I can’t wait to see it in two years, you know, around 2012. Maybe it’s my totalitarian Roman heritage, but I for one welcome our new Facebook overlords. OpenSocialism is a wave that can only be ridden.