[Air-L] [Fwd: more facebook analysis...]

Paula Graham pmgazz at gmail.com
Sat Sep 1 10:08:04 PDT 2007



-----Original Message-----
From: Garth Graham [mailto:garth.graham at telus.net]
Sent: 31 August 2007 21:35
To: advisors at tc.ca; AFCN Members; privsec at wsis-cs.org;
ciresearchers at vancouvercommunity.net
Subject: [ciresearchers]

The following article from the Toronto Globe and Mail recommends open
standards for social networking functions as an antidote to the
"irritations" of things like Facebook.  It hadn't occurred to me
before reading it that social networking is an important dimension of
"user-centric digital identity."  But, since identity is defined in
social relationship, obviously it should have.  Now Ivor Tossell
doesn't say anything about identity as such.  But my thanks to him
for broadening my thinking about achieving ownership of identity online.

Because it will block the kind of "walled gardens" the article refers
to, achieving user-centric digital identity as an extension of
Internet Protocol is utterly critical to the Internet's survival.
But it's one of those  issues that's so highly specialized that
hardly anyone is paying attention to it.  Because capacity to support
social networking contributes to the self organization of community
online, perhaps open standards for social networking is one of those
issues that community networking organizations should be paying
attention to?  Does anyone know who is working on open standards for
social networking?  And does anyone have suggestions as to how
community networking organizations could support that work?

GG

  =======================
Ivor Tossell.  Why I believe Facebook's days are numbered.  Globe and
Mail, August 31, 2007, R5


After Facebook, what?

The delicious riddle of Facebook's future is part parlour game, part
billion-dollar question. It might just be me, but I'm hearing more
grumbling than raving about the site these days. For people who
joined earlier in the year, the novelty has worn off. The rush of
long-lost acquaintances clamouring for renewed "friendship" has
petered out. After all, one can only have gone to grade school with
so many people.

There's also the fact that the only thing with tastes more fickle
than a teenager is the media. In this corner, anyway, Facebook got so
overexposed so quickly that we're getting loath to raise it again,
what with readers' groans echoing pre-emptively in our ears.

Facebook moved to forestall ennui by allowing third parties to write
add-ons to their service, but so far the most compelling of these add-
ons allow people to play online Scrabble with one another and add
their pets as friends. So, for many, things have settled into a
period of quiet stagnation, in which Facebook's mild diversions weigh
off against its mild irritations.

It follows that I'm not just being curmudgeonly to suggest that
Facebook's days in the sun are numbered. It's not going to implode
any time soon, but the sheen will wear off, and the vanguard of cool
kids will seek greener pastures, and the cheerleading media will
chase after them as soon as it clues in. But what will those greener
pastures look like?

One option is that they will look a lot like Facebook, but with a new
name and some appealing innovations - say, maybe some way of
structuring "friendships" so that your best friend of decades is not
given the same status as your Grade 9 nemesis.

But a site like that would share the same Achilles heel that Facebook
shares with Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, and all the other social
networks that came before it. To use your Facebook account, you first
have to log into Facebook. Everything you do there is transacted in
Facebook's private la-la land. Facebook news, Facebook mail, Facebook
friends. It's a Web within the Web, a world unto its own, something
they call a "walled garden" website.

What's the downside to a walled garden? For one thing, it faces users
with a my-way-or-the-highway decision. If you want to talk to friends
on Facebook, you need a Facebook account. That's fine and dandy so
long as everyone is using Facebook. But, as per the immutable laws of
ennui, it seems unlikely that everyone will stay there forever. You
can't add people who use MySpace to a Facebook account, and so on.
Nor is that list of friends you've built up any good for any
application outside of the Facebook universe.

The whole thing reminds me of a behemoth of yesteryear. Remember
America Online? In the early nineties, its private network offered
subscribers a fun, easy-to-use online experience before the Web as we
know it even existed. You could point-and-click your way through
discussion forums and live chats. You could even find pictures of
Marilyn Monroe in various states of undress. I remember this
specifically, because I was 12, and it was momentous.

America Online was able to leapfrog existing services by using its
own private technology on its own private network; standards of the
day were clunky and text-based. But in the end, it couldn't keep up
with a peculiar open network that crept up from behind: the World
Wide Web.

You didn't have to subscribe to services from any one company to
access the Web. Instead, you could use any Web browser on any
computer, because they all spoke the same language. You usually had
to pay someone for access, but you weren't bound to them. As the Web
grew and diversified, AOL's walled garden became less and less fragrant.

AOL's glory days are long gone. Today, it's a big corporate Internet
service provider like any other, driving users towards a big, dumb,
mass-market website. (Current top headline: "Crunchy Twist on Chicken
Salad!") Facebook today is like the AOL of 15 years ago. It's big,
it's on top of its game, and it doesn't play nicely with others. But
imagine if it did.

Right now, Facebook and its competitors own their users' lists of
friends. To access your network, you have to log into Facebook. But
what if that list of relationships didn't belong exclusively to
Facebook? What if your friend's list lived out on the Internet, and
could be used by any authorized website or application?

For instance, that same network of friends might pop up in Microsoft
Word, where you could call on people to collaborate on documents.
Your contacts would be available on the Web-surfing smartphones we're
all about to have foisted upon us. It would power your instant-
messaging chat, the list of people who can see your private Flickr
album, and on, and on.
An open standard would let users access the same universal social
network through whichever service they like. Facebook and its
brethren would be left looking like gated suburbs next to thriving
neighbourhoods.

The nerd in me wants to see it happen, even though the fact remains
that it's easier to make money from a closed system, at least in the
near term. But if an open standard liberated networks of friends from
the clutches of their chosen social networking site, a plethora of
possibilities would emerge.

So, back to where we started. After Facebook, what? Personally, I'm
hoping for the deluge.

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