a few days ago, after having re-introduced myself to facebook for about 24 hours, i was all like “facebook is amazing“. now, with a few more weeks of facebooking under my belt, i think it appropriate to give my thoughts again.
i feel i now have a better understanding of the “bigger picture” and am not nearly as wound up as i was last time. part of my understanding comes from actually using facebook itself, and another part comes from reading other people’s opinions on the matter.
on the whole, facebook is probably one of the best “general” social-networking sites around. there are plenty of other social-networks out there that specifically revolve around photos or activities or genealogy or music or even surfing the web. facebook used to be about school, now it’s about anyone, now it’s general.
it does a lot of things well. it looks good, it flows well, it provides it’s users a lot of options, and there aren’t thousands of flashing ads all over the place. unfortunately, facebook does one thing that almost outways all the positives: it’s completely private. if you aren’t a member, the site is completely useless (you don’t have to be a member of Flickr to look at my photos).
and sometimes things are too private even when you are a member. for instance, if i am searching for a real-life friend of mine that i’m not already “friends” with, facebook only gives me 1 picture, their name, and their location. sometimes that’s not enough, sometimes i need more (they could always just offer a “private or public” option).
as much as i hate myspace, it at least provides me with a permalink (myspace.com/eliduke) to my space and allows non-users access to some of my information. i can even write blog posts on myspace that non-users can read and subscribe to using RSS. there isn’t a single RSS feed anywhere on facebook.
when facebook opened the doors to highschools and then businesses and then anyone, they should have also opened at least some of the doors to non-users. why the hell not?
Filed under: nerdery
evan, abby and i talked about this a bunch on while we were in traffic.
the thing that evan said that really articulate a lot of my feelings regarding the Facebook Platform was this: “A platform exists so that others can add value to Facebook. An API exists so that Facebook can add value to others.” that’s the big distinction; the direction of the relationship.
imagine a world of lots of platforms. it’s easy to see how expensive it becomes to build/re-build your application/widget for each one. imagine the twitter application/widget has to be built and maintained for 15 different platforms, all of which are a little (or a lot) different in the implementation details.
pretty quickly, twitter is spending all their time on these widgets for other people’s platforms rather than developing the core app itself. it’s similar to desktop operating systems.
let’s say that there are 3 main operating systems: Mac OS X, Windows and misc unix variants (i know it’s more complicated than that). very few software developers build for all of those and that’s only three! multiple that by 5 and things just get worse.
one other thing, the direction of the relationship doesn’t have to be one-way. look at amazon.com. they’ve created an API that lets outside apps do almost anything that amazon proper can do. that has added value to any number of outside applications (Delicious Libaray is a good example), but value has also been added back to amazon by this too.
this couldn’t've happened if it was merely an amazon platform. it’s too much of a gamble and too restrictive to bet so much on one player, even a big one (especially a big one). like video game software companies and their console maker counterparts. companies that went with Xbox 360 or playstation are locked into that platform and the decisions that microsoft or sony makes for them, like the price of the console. so if the platform goes sour, the software companies go with it.
whereas, withsomething like amazon’s api, if the mothership (amazon in this case) goes totally belly up, the users of the api don’t have to scramble quite so much. vendor lock-in == bad!
i get it… french class! i see it now.