In a phrase that will deservedly pass almost instantaneously to meme-hood, Jason Kottke says “Facebook is the new AOL.” Facebook has persuaded lots of Web services and sites to build applications on its platform, but the proprietary, walled-garden approach will ultimately grow tiresome:
As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet…
Kottke points his post back to an observation by Meetup’s Scott Heiferman about the AOL/Facebook parallel. But I also caught echoes of Jon Udell’s post back in February about “social network fatigue”:
Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”
Dave Winer has been writing lately as well about social-network overload and the usefulness of arriving at a single, interoperable standard for identity:
Marc Canter and many other people think I’m full of it when I say the right number of identity systems for each user is 1. But I am right. And I know it…Here’s a hint. How many email systems do you use? RSS systems? Web systems? The correct answers are 1, 1, and 1.
This is a hugely important topic — subset of a larger one that I expect to devote some energy to writing about in the future. The common theme here is the centripetal force of the Internet. We start with services that help people do something important but simple (like: use email, build a web page, start a blog); those services fight for share by walling themselves off; eventually, the service that gets in the way least wins the most users, and those users are able to conduct their activities on the open Net.
[tags]social networking, facebook, world of ends, walled gardens, aol[/tags]
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Scott, in can be more subtle than “the service that gets in the way least wins” – the service that is readily implementable and open can win too. See my post for more:
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2007/06/open-versus-closed-code-and-networks.html
Yeah. I agree. My formulation oversimplifies in many ways. Really this is something worth writing in much greater depth on, which I intend to do as I’m able!
Scott —
One word: spam.
The entire Internet used to be a walled garden. Back in the ARPA days, in order to get access to the Internet, you had to identify yourself and promise that you’d play nice. This meant that authentication wasn’t needed on the email system (which had the very nice side effect that email was really easy to implement and computationally cheap to run).
Fast forward to 1994, and anybody can get on and anybody can email anyone. Spam. Headaches.
Facebook, being a walled garden, can keep spam out. That is a significant competitive advantage.
Agree with you and Dave that they are crumbling and that it’s a good thing, but the process will take a long time. AOL has sustained much of it’s empire through sheer “momentum”. While there is a tendency to reduce the number of applications we want to use there is also a tendency to stick with ones we know. Users search Google out of habit, not becaue they have ongoing experimentation to conclude it suits them better than Yahoo. The killer application – a one stop internet shop for all things online – will have to overcome powerful habits.