Facebook Is My New Boatcar
Facebook's relentless drive away from privacy has garnered a lot of attention lately. For those of us who have been working towards building decentralised networks for some time now, the attention heaped upon Diaspora comes as no surprise. They've done a fantastic job raising the need for open alternatives to Facebook.
Matt Asay's post yesterday, Facebook has problems, Diaspora isn't one of them, argues that being free and open isn't enough. The end-user experience of social networks is what matters, he says. Because a great user experience isn't at Diaspora's heart, it's doomed to fail. His argument is persuasive and, as anyone who's ever built a user-facing application knows, it's absolutely correct.
Here's the thing: while Diaspora's aim is freedom, that doesn't mean that open alternatives to Facebook are all prioritising the same thing. The biggest challenge that Facebook is facing, above privacy, above the threat of falling out of fashion, above up-and-coming competition from Twitter or Foursquare or that-social-network-you've-never-heard-of, is this:
Facebook is building a Boat-Car.
Boat-cars seem seem like a pretty awesome idea, but the fundamental challenge of combining a sealed hull with external wheels means that boat-cars will never be able to match the performance or aesthetics of cars or boats. Pursuing the entire social market, Facebook has attempted to adapt itself to every new feature of the social web. They started out as a Friendster-alike that emphasised intentional communities, and did it well, providing elegant social utilities to university students. But since then, they've systematically bolted on features in an attempt to build a vehicle that does everything that Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, Email and IM do, to name a few examples. Increasingly, they're trying to become a framework for the web in general so that everything a web user does is done through Facebook. Instead of offering a carefully constructed vehicle that offers amazing social experiences, they have a created a clumsy boat-car that can never truly compete with more focused sites.
What Facebook does have, fundamentally, is the social graph. Where Flickr has a careful treatment of photo sharing, Facebook has photo sharing built on an expansive substrate of communities. Where Twitter has an insane ability to capture and amplify the low-level hum of human communication, Facebook has an insane ability to execute at scale unlike anyone since Google. Where Google has an intimate understanding of the flows of data on the web, Facebook has an intimate understanding of how to keep their users engaged. Most importantly, Facebook has hundreds of millions of users, and the network effects are in full force.
While no one will ever be able to overcome Facebook's advantage on Facebook's terms, just as no one was able to defeat Microsoft on Microsoft's terms, it's downright easy to create better social experiences than Facebook's. It's easy to create better tools than Facebook's. It's also easy to imagine a better social environment than theirs. Logging into Facebook is for me like walking into a room where everyone I've ever met is standing around, talking to each-other. My bosses, my family, friends old and new, co-workers, acquaintances, everyone! It's like attending a nightmare wedding in hell.
The challenge isn't social network portability; I regularly fly all the way around the world just to reconfigure my social network and have different conversations than the ones I normally have. I'll gladly log into a different site if it means I can see just work-related conversations, or just family photos. The challenge is that the only viable place for those activities today is Facebook. Their network effects are of so much larger a magnitude than anyone else's that creating a new social site without leveraging Facebook's network is a downright crazy idea. Therein lies Facebook's weakness, and the weakness of every dominant but "closed" network.
This is where open, decentralised alternatives come in. Instead of relying on Facebook's social graph, social web tools can be built on top of the one true social network: everyone. Instead of building boat-cars — ugly tools that try to do too much — developers could focus on building the best photo sharing site in the world, or the best recipe sharing site, or the best book sharing site. In this world, if someone wants to come along and compete, they do so on features and execution, without first having to steal away all the users from the site that got there first. We'd end up with better experiences and tools instead of just dominant ones.
Facebook's tools might be the very best for right now, but it's frankly ridiculous to think that Facebook will be able to provide either the tools or even the infrastructure for the next five or ten or twenty years of development of the web. The job of serious web developers today is to ignore the siren call of Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Adobe, or any other comers that would define the parameters of the web for them, and instead build the best experiences possible. If you protest, and say that Facebook allows you to connect your users with each-other more easily than any alternative, ask yourself if Facebook's interface is the best you can imagine, or if you feel closely connected to your network on Facebook (or Twitter, or any "platform" provider), or if your network on Facebook represents all of your social interactions. If the answer isn't emphatically YES!, then it's worth your while to consider the alternatives.
Hell, if you work at Facebook and you can't emphatically answer yes to those questions, then it's worth your while to consider the alternatives. After all, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. And trust me, you can't beat the web, because in the long term, the web isn't subject to anti-trust suits, doesn't have financial constraints, and can keep evolving until something works.
posted by Blaine at
10:08 PM
8 Comments:
I think Facebook is just reacting towards the natural direction of the market. Maybe 6 or so years ago before Facebook, the idea of sharing everything online would have really horrified people, but now, I think most people are more used to it. There's no way that something like DirtyPhoneBook could exist, for example, if society wasn't increasingly open and used to the idea of openness. I don't think that developers should waste time building Facebook apps though, but working on expanding their own offerings in the best way possible. I think Facebook's issue these days though isn't losing peoples trust about privacy though so much as it is that it's lost its cool.
Nice thinking Blaine - would love to discuss/debate with you if you are at IIW next week. The problem for would-be alternatives is that Facebook has educated the world as to the value of a simple to use 'do everything' social network... and I think that's the new baseline. Of course - one could construct a great social network using a mashup with 'best of breed' components that also work well independently. Lots more to say on the topic - just ask JP. : ) Cheers, Rolf (@rolfvb)
I like the idea that we do not need one über application to rule them all. That makes perfect sense. I think, though, that I would gravitate more toward and ends versus means analysis of this. I think that it really does matter HOW / WHY the tool is built as much or more than what the END experience is. The right ends usually show up if the means is done right.
Of course, this comes from seeing how indymedia sites still function on old technology and now relatively lacking experiences because the intention of the communities involved, including respect for privacy and autonomy, line up with that of the users. Similarly, I think tools like crabgrass and diaspora can and should focus on the freedom aspect. Certainly, the initial developers should focus on that. I don't think that focus prevents them from being serious developers any more than not being able to manipulate pointers should ;) More than likely, if they build something made for people, like freedom-site, instead of a boat-car, someone will come along and drop a friendly-face on top of it.
If there is anything that my movement onto and off of Facebook, as well as my real life, has taught me is that we should spend less time looking at what we see on the outside, and a lot more at the *heart* of the matter.
I'm not sure Facebook is such the boat-car that you describe.
Sharing recipes, or photos in a proper environment is essential to semi-pros — but Facebook rather goes after the casual, the pretext, making a site trying to accomodate the mundane and the pros (like those you quote) look like a boat-car. Those websites assemble either users, or practices, or interests… but all have to decide where to put the line, and how to compromise, and I'm not sure you'd enjoy having to deal with the hassles of pasting to your desktop a great mock-up from Flickr (where you have your amateur photo group, including a colleague) to your software-architecture-sharing site… Yes, this case is liminal, but I'd argue that a decisie minority of cases are similarly liminal and demand a Facebook-like all-encompassing enveloppe, otherwise the by-object websites that you which for would have more success than Facebook.
Having an architecture that can help you reconcile your identities between, say: tech blogs (one object) and tech columns in the paper (another object) is hard — at least without a Facebook Connect to rule them all. Don't get me wrong: I'm saddened by it, althemore because the current Dictator-for-life of what seems to be the necessary central platform doesn't seem so benevolent, but his site didn't won *in spite* of being a car-boat for loosely defined “Friends“, but because he managed to make it acceptable as a car-boat for anyone you've met, ie. a "Friend”.
Rolf: I will be at IIW! If Facebook were to "give up" on the other fronts and just be the social graph, nothing more, nothing less, then I'm sure they'd do a great job. Of course, I don't think many people would (or should) be happy with giving a single organisation that much power.
Jesse: I cherish that sentiment. There are few things more important than freedom for it's own sake. My worry is that the current trajectories of Facebook, Twitter, Apple, et. al. make it umpteen times more difficult for free alternatives to operate (c.f., network effects). I'm worried that we won't have a world where Diaspora and Crabgrass are viable alternatives. Imagine IndyMedia's prospects circa 1999 if "Everyone" used AOL's not-the-web browser instead of the web — I think that's the sort of situation we find ourselves in now.
Bertil: I absolutely agree, and this is exactly what I'm calling for. We need a unifying way to carry out social activities on the web. Facebook running the show isn't acceptable, nor is it sustainable. I've written about what I think the alternatives are before, and I'm excited that groups like Diaspora, GNU Social, and Identi.ca, to name but a few, are pursuing real alternatives. Without building boat-cars.
Great post Blaine... and a shameless plug for OneSocialWeb.org whilst I'm here... There's a lot of excellent initiatives starting to work towards a more open social Web - let's hope everyone can pull at the oars together on this one.
I loved this post, and have mentioned it in my latest, where I argue that Facebook could capitalise on the wider business opportunity to facilitate collaboration between people and organisations, rather than selling people's data.
Based on the amount of semi-coherent blog comment spam flying around, I think it is clear that dirty phonebook.com will be the dominant boat car over the next 10 years.
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