We are in the AOL days of social networking
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We are in the AOL days of social networking
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#2There 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."
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#3this 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.
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#4What 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.
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#5this 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..."
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#6What 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.
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.
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#7I 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.
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#8I 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 lik…
Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web
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.
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#9I 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 lik…
Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web 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.
To rephrase what I think the poster's point was:
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.
Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking
#10What 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.
IM still hasn't made any serious money...