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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

#61

Post by extension »

timdellinger wrote: post #16

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…

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.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#62

Post by nroman »

JonnieCache wrote: post #37
yariv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on the Facebook platform team. 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 want to be able to dump out the photos from all the albums which contain photos of me. The API doesn't let me do this without a hack involving walking all my friends albums. EDIT: and a full realtime read/write XMPP-style interface for all the data going in/out of my profile please! :)

Check out https://graph.facebook.com/me/photos?access_token= graph api access token here>

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#63

Post by wladimir »

RobPfeifer wrote: post #55

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'…

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.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#64

Post by hessenwolf »

bradleyland wrote: post #60
timdellinger wrote: post #16

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…

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…

And yahoo to google. Facebook has a bigger moat because of logins, but, erm, I still think messaging is a pain in the ass.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#65

Post by jasonkester »

That metaphor just doesn't work.

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.

Re: We are in the AOL days of social networking

#66

Post by samlevine »

moe wrote: post #44
BarkMore wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imagine what the world would be like if we couldn't do that. It would probably be little bit like needing an account on Facebook, Linkedin, Xing, Twitter, Myspace, Flickr, Google and a dozen other properties that barely - if at all - interact with one another. It would suck. Exactly.

>It would suck.

Not for most users. They simply reuse the same login credentials at all the sites they use. Other sites make apps that allow data to flow into Facebook easily.

Soon all Facebook users will be able to maintain their contact information over a variety of methods (e-mail, sms, etc.).

In the end, we already have a federated network that solves the problem for most people: Facebook.

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