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We are in the AOL days of social networking

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Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#11

Post by dasil003 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #5
MBlume wrote: post #3

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 ve…

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.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#12

Post by imaginator »

jonknee wrote: post #10
BarkMore wrote: post #4

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.

IM still hasn't made any serious money...

sometimes its about doing the right thing

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#13

Post by dasil003 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #8
dasil003 wrote: post #7

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 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.

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.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#15

Post by michaelchisari »

dasil003 wrote: post #11
michaelchisari wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

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.

This isn't just about myself, though. There are approximately 50 other projects all working towards distributed social network. Some may be farther than others, but there's just too much interest from the open source world to say that Facebook's reign (or the reign of walled gardens, even) is immortal.

And I would even wager that, once a protocol is adopted, that some of the smaller social networking sites will add support for it as a way to compete with the big guys.

It may take time, it may not be for a while, and it won't happen over night, but those of us who believe strongly in the open web are a bit too zealous to ever admit defeat.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#16

Post by timdellinger »

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.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#17

Post by McP »

michaelchisari wrote: post #5
MBlume wrote: post #3

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 ve…

You mean like http://www.opensocial.org/ ?

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#18

Post by dasil003 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #15
dasil003 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't just about myself, though. There are approximately 50 other projects all working towards distributed social network. Some may be farther than others, but there's just too much interest from the open source world to say that Facebook's reign (or the reign of walled gardens, even) is immortal. And I would even wager that, once a protocol is adopted, that some of the smaller social networking sites will add s…

Sure, but how long will it take to topple Facebook? The article talks about 2011. I'd be willing to bet Facebook will still be the largest social network in 2020. 10 years in tech is an eternity, so I feel that that's a pretty strong assertion. To say that some kind of set of open social networking protocol will dominate in 15, 20, 30 years is a pretty open-ended prediction that's hard to argue with.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#20

Post by portman »

[deleted] wrote: post #14
27182818284 wrote: post #2

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."

[deleted]

The Quantcast metric you're referring to is 80 million unique US people per week.

Facebook's number is the number of global active users.

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