As much as I agree with the overall premise (Facebook won't be king of the mountain forever), I'm still a bit unsure about what the driving force will be for users to go from Facebook to "open" alternatives.
The driving force for leaving AOL was clear: there's a big, exciting internet out there that's more interesting and innovative than AOL chatrooms and AOL keywords, and the user base was also getting a little more comfortable with computers and didn't need AOL to hold it's hand so much any more.
I don't see a similar driving force for leaving Facebook. As a matter of fact, Facebook is embracing innovation, pre-emptively embracing whatever things might give users a reason to jump ship.
We've already seen one mass-user migration from MySpace to Facebook. What happens when a newcomer caters to the needs of a large enough portion of the Facebook crowd that you get fragmentation? Will people simply accept the social fiefdoms, or will they seek out something different? Something more open?
Were this new, open network to exist, you could re-write the statement in your second paragraph to read:
"There's a big, exciting open social network out there that's more interesting and innovative than Facebook messages and friend feeds, and the user base is also getting a little more comfortable with computers and don't need Facebook to hold it's hand so much any more."
That's not to say I don't think Facebook would react positively and hook in to any open networks, but it's going to take some serious momentum to get them to pivot.
It was extensibility and low barrier-to-entry that ultimately gave the web its edge over the centralized online services. Growing corporate beurocracies couldn't keep up with the creativity happening in the wild.
If social is a frontier with similarly unrealized potential, an open platform will eventually emerge and innovation will happen there. Cool new things that Facebook can't wrap their head around will draw people away.
One of those new things will become so popular and so essential that its centralized control becomes a general threat, and all this happens again.
Also, it would be foolish to think that Facebook isn't also aware of this analogy. I am certain they are looking at how AOL lost their stronghold and working to correct those mistakes. That is likely the driving force behind FB's willingness to participate in the open web (on their terms).
I'm not sure the comparison is so precise that the outcome is predicted. There's no sure bet that Facebook will go the way of AOL.
I like this comparison more as a mitigating factor to closed-web alarmism. This is not the first time the open web has felt itself under attack. And if a big player DOES make moves to try to get in between the free flow of information we all know and love, there are historical examples of the free web fighting back, and winning!
I don't use Facebook, but I don't think it's evil... yet. But it's shown some scary tendencies. It's nice to know we've seen a company abuse it's massively dominant market share, and pay.
I agree with you, and came ere to say what you have -- however I can name a few reasons why FB users will leave/choose to be non-participants.
(Disclaimer, I do not have, nor shall I ever have a FB account)
Lets assume that in the next few years FB userbase doubles. 20% of the population of the planet has an account.
The amount of data held on those users is immense, and as such, of keen interest to the corporate oligopoly that is government -- There is a very good incentive alone to not have an account on FB.
I am sure there will be a not-insignificant number of people whose ability to get jobs/keep jobs will be inhibited by FB.
I also can imagine FB fueling interest in even more privacy as well - and groups of people with a personal desire to have absolutely ZERO information about them online will be a small but real niche in the populous.
I like the sentiment, but I just want to share pictures from my latest beer pong victory man!
The point is that humans are horrible at risk modeling, particularly teen agers and those in early adulthood.
We as a society seem to be heading towards an expectation of less privacy, which makes Facebook and Google easier to tolerate.
The reason Facebook will fail is when a fundamental shift happens in society that Facebook isn't designed to handle. Facebook really came about because of a mobile population coupled with a need to track our social graphs. Even 30 or 50 years ago facebook couldn't have existed, because everyone you wanted to talk to was only a few minutes drive away.
What if social networking is like instant messaging? After many years, the proprietary instant messaging services have not been replaced with an open alternative. Open does not always win.
The fact that the proprietary protocols haven't been replaced by more open alternatives is largely irrelevant where the end-user is concerned. As long as the protocols have been reverse-engineered to the point where cross-platform tools are possible, it doesn't matter (to the user) whether the underlying protocols are open or closed.
There are now a plethora of instant messenger clients that allow for a single sign on to various instant messaging networks. I think we might see the same in the future for social networks. Facebook and Twitter will be relegated to the role that the various instant message protocols play in a multi-network client.
Not only have the client to server protocols been reverse engineered, some proprietary IM services supply libraries for using their proprietary client to server protocols.
When I mentioned IM, I was referring to the fact that service to service communication is closed. With the exception of the XMPP network and some one-off deals between some of the big services, services to not communicate with each other. There is not a single federated instant messaging network.
There is a single federated network for email. I can send a message from my account on Hotmail to Gmail without having an account on Gmail. Imagine what the world would be like if we couldn't do that. We would all have accounts on several services, each with their own inbox. It would suck.
Give it time. At some point in the not so distant future, we could all be using smartphones that just have data plans. Then we'll get to see if SMS sticks around.
I personally find SMS far to expensive for the amount of information I can communicate using it. Texting is last resort, I much prefer to call someone or attempt to contact them on steam or facebook IM.
Open alternatives exist; they have not replaced the proprietary alternatives. "Replaced" is the key word. AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve are dead. There's still a company with the AOL name and I guess I can't quite guarantee there isn't some AOL-subscription-only service left somewhere, but they don't matter. AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, QQ, and Facebook chat all matter.
(Global penetration of the various services are very uneven; if you're an American you may think ICQ is dead but it's still big in Russia, for instance. Yes, I know ICQ and AIM are basically the same thing but the brand is still separate. Everything I mentioned is indeed still a going concern in at least one major region of the world,. You can of course add IRC, and depending on your mood you can add Google Talk; it may be XMPP and perfectly capable of XMPP federation but almost nobody realizes it, so in practice it's more isolated than you might think.)
I don't like the analogy. AOL wanted to be the gatekeeper to the Internet and charge users a fee for their "premium" content. They were replaced because the internet is infrastructure, and a million other entities created sites and services that were better than what AOL was trying to charge for.
Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web, and sinks it's hooks in via extremely elegant and lightweight hooks like Login with Facebook and FBJS that have impeccable usability and deliver measurable value to site owners. They are not fighting against current trends, rather they are defining and riding them.
Facebook will not be in trouble until their business model starts to collide with user interests. Privacy concerns are a potential problem for them, but don't fool yourselves that even a sizable minority of users care about that yet.
Facebook Platform supports OAuth as a standard authentication protocol for 3rd party apps. It also provides APIs that developers can use to export data users have entered into facebook (with the user's permission, of course). What do you think is missing in Facebook's support for data portability?
I didn't say Facebook supports the open web. I said they embrace it (think MS embrace and extend). They don't expect you to stay on Facebook all the time, they give tools to allow Facebook to be on all sites, and they give site owners incentive to use those tools.
this article mostly seems like a lot of applause lights. The author likes 'open' and wants to believe that 'open' will win. It's won once before, and so the author calls it 'inevitable'. That's not supporting an argument. The universe is still allowed to turn around and say 'so what,' and do something different.
It's inevitable, because those of us who are working on it aren't going to give up, amongst other reasons.
Further, the ability to have niche/community/localized, etc. social networking sites that inter-operate is an achilles heel to the one-site-fits-all approach of Facebook.
Once a set of social networking sites come out that inter-operate, and people see how it's done, then Facebook, Myspace, etc. will all feel very antiquated and walled off. Imagine when people started trading email addresses, and the AOL people had to say "no, I can't email, but my aol screen name is..."
That doesn't mean it's inevitable, you may well die before you succeed.
The ability for federated social networking to take off hinges on user experience. It's not impossible, but Facebook has a huge advantage in crafting a user experience because it doesn't have to worry about the technical pitfalls of a federated system.
There are more people using Facebook than there are people in the US. AOL and its chat rooms were the "AOL days" of social networking. We're in a type of middle. The line from Space Balls comes to mind: "We're at now, now."
I hope we'll end up with something open, but I have my doubts. There are still many closed systems that indicate that it may not happen:
* Apple released their closed Mac Store today after 25+ years of a open system, to add to their many closed systems. Apple have shown several times they will block apps. they don't like.
* We've had 35+ years of games consoles, on which the games are tightly controlled by the supplier of the console. Microsoft have already indicated they will not allow certain types of games in to use Kinect.
* 100+ years after the invention of the Telephone we have Skype, which is controlled by a single company.
* Whilst Email is open. Microsoft, Google or Yahoo control so much of the market they can and do effectively stop you talking to your customers by marking your mails as spam and making it hard to appeal (e.g. previous spammer on your IP)
AOL was a walled garden that survived first by convincing people that there was no real Internet outside of it, and then by trying to pretend that the "Internet" was just a part of AOL.
Eventually, people caught on that there was in fact this giant Internet out there all by itself, and AOL wasn't technically required to access it. So people left.
Facebook, however, is the entire Facebook. There is no giant social entity outside of it that people are being kept away from. It's an end product.
So sure, somebody may make a bigger, better one. But they're not going to suddenly remove the blindfold and expose Facebook users to the Truth, because it's just plain not out there.
Open doesn't always win - check out Tim Wu's book the Master Switch. It traces the history of telephone, TV, radio, film (and the Internet, though I haven't gotten there yet). Theodore Vail and AT&T essentially created a massive closed network and David Sarnoff at RCA/NBC did the same with radio & television. They eventually lost their grip on their monopolies, but the government was involved in both. While this isn't a perfect analogy, the imperialist nature of their founders sounds familiar :)
One interesting question: If Facebook and Twitter are NBC and CBS, who will be the cable provider for social networking?
That's very USA-centered though. Usually, something was open in some countries and closed in others, depending on legislation in that country. Closed systems of global scale are a pretty new thing, and it's not clear how this will play out.
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The driving force for leaving AOL was clear: there's a big, exciting internet out there that's more interesting and innovative than AOL chatrooms and AOL keywords, and the user base was also getting a little more comfortable with computers and didn't need AOL to hold it's hand so much any more.
I don't see a similar driving force for leaving Facebook. As a matter of fact, Facebook is embracing innovation, pre-emptively embracing whatever things might give users a reason to jump ship.
Were this new, open network to exist, you could re-write the statement in your second paragraph to read:
"There's a big, exciting open social network out there that's more interesting and innovative than Facebook messages and friend feeds, and the user base is also getting a little more comfortable with computers and don't need Facebook to hold it's hand so much any more."
That's not to say I don't think Facebook would react positively and hook in to any open networks, but it's going to take some serious momentum to get them to pivot.
If social is a frontier with similarly unrealized potential, an open platform will eventually emerge and innovation will happen there. Cool new things that Facebook can't wrap their head around will draw people away.
One of those new things will become so popular and so essential that its centralized control becomes a general threat, and all this happens again.
I like this comparison more as a mitigating factor to closed-web alarmism. This is not the first time the open web has felt itself under attack. And if a big player DOES make moves to try to get in between the free flow of information we all know and love, there are historical examples of the free web fighting back, and winning!
I don't use Facebook, but I don't think it's evil... yet. But it's shown some scary tendencies. It's nice to know we've seen a company abuse it's massively dominant market share, and pay.
(Disclaimer, I do not have, nor shall I ever have a FB account)
Lets assume that in the next few years FB userbase doubles. 20% of the population of the planet has an account.
The amount of data held on those users is immense, and as such, of keen interest to the corporate oligopoly that is government -- There is a very good incentive alone to not have an account on FB.
I am sure there will be a not-insignificant number of people whose ability to get jobs/keep jobs will be inhibited by FB.
I also can imagine FB fueling interest in even more privacy as well - and groups of people with a personal desire to have absolutely ZERO information about them online will be a small but real niche in the populous.
The point is that humans are horrible at risk modeling, particularly teen agers and those in early adulthood.
We as a society seem to be heading towards an expectation of less privacy, which makes Facebook and Google easier to tolerate.
The reason Facebook will fail is when a fundamental shift happens in society that Facebook isn't designed to handle. Facebook really came about because of a mobile population coupled with a need to track our social graphs. Even 30 or 50 years ago facebook couldn't have existed, because everyone you wanted to talk to was only a few minutes drive away.
There are now a plethora of instant messenger clients that allow for a single sign on to various instant messaging networks. I think we might see the same in the future for social networks. Facebook and Twitter will be relegated to the role that the various instant message protocols play in a multi-network client.
When I mentioned IM, I was referring to the fact that service to service communication is closed. With the exception of the XMPP network and some one-off deals between some of the big services, services to not communicate with each other. There is not a single federated instant messaging network.
There is a single federated network for email. I can send a message from my account on Hotmail to Gmail without having an account on Gmail. Imagine what the world would be like if we couldn't do that. We would all have accounts on several services, each with their own inbox. It would suck.
(Global penetration of the various services are very uneven; if you're an American you may think ICQ is dead but it's still big in Russia, for instance. Yes, I know ICQ and AIM are basically the same thing but the brand is still separate. Everything I mentioned is indeed still a going concern in at least one major region of the world,. You can of course add IRC, and depending on your mood you can add Google Talk; it may be XMPP and perfectly capable of XMPP federation but almost nobody realizes it, so in practice it's more isolated than you might think.)
Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web, and sinks it's hooks in via extremely elegant and lightweight hooks like Login with Facebook and FBJS that have impeccable usability and deliver measurable value to site owners. They are not fighting against current trends, rather they are defining and riding them.
Facebook will not be in trouble until their business model starts to collide with user interests. Privacy concerns are a potential problem for them, but don't fool yourselves that even a sizable minority of users care about that yet.
No offense, but I find that to be an odd definition of "open web".
They don't support a distributed protocol and they don't support data portability in any meaningful way.
AOL wanted to pretend the rest of the net didn't exist. We've seen where that game plan leads: irrelevance.
Facebook, contrariwise, is willing to accept the existence of non-Facebook material on the net, even if the long-term plan is to Borg it.
Facebook Platform supports OAuth as a standard authentication protocol for 3rd party apps. It also provides APIs that developers can use to export data users have entered into facebook (with the user's permission, of course). What do you think is missing in Facebook's support for data portability?
Further, the ability to have niche/community/localized, etc. social networking sites that inter-operate is an achilles heel to the one-site-fits-all approach of Facebook.
Once a set of social networking sites come out that inter-operate, and people see how it's done, then Facebook, Myspace, etc. will all feel very antiquated and walled off. Imagine when people started trading email addresses, and the AOL people had to say "no, I can't email, but my aol screen name is..."
The ability for federated social networking to take off hinges on user experience. It's not impossible, but Facebook has a huge advantage in crafting a user experience because it doesn't have to worry about the technical pitfalls of a federated system.
Deleted Comment
* Apple released their closed Mac Store today after 25+ years of a open system, to add to their many closed systems. Apple have shown several times they will block apps. they don't like.
* We've had 35+ years of games consoles, on which the games are tightly controlled by the supplier of the console. Microsoft have already indicated they will not allow certain types of games in to use Kinect.
* 100+ years after the invention of the Telephone we have Skype, which is controlled by a single company.
* Whilst Email is open. Microsoft, Google or Yahoo control so much of the market they can and do effectively stop you talking to your customers by marking your mails as spam and making it hard to appeal (e.g. previous spammer on your IP)
AOL was a walled garden that survived first by convincing people that there was no real Internet outside of it, and then by trying to pretend that the "Internet" was just a part of AOL.
Eventually, people caught on that there was in fact this giant Internet out there all by itself, and AOL wasn't technically required to access it. So people left.
Facebook, however, is the entire Facebook. There is no giant social entity outside of it that people are being kept away from. It's an end product.
So sure, somebody may make a bigger, better one. But they're not going to suddenly remove the blindfold and expose Facebook users to the Truth, because it's just plain not out there.
One interesting question: If Facebook and Twitter are NBC and CBS, who will be the cable provider for social networking?