Let’s talk about Facebook for a minute (I’ll ignore MySpace for now since it’s basically Facebook’s very ugly and very dumb little bastard brother). Let’s look at both the good and the really stupid. Facebook gives you a way to easily join, and search for friends, and do things with like look at you friend’s pictures and interact using the site. On top of that they build (and let others build) Facebook apps to increase what you can do there. They do it well, but it’s pretty much like every other social site. You join, you put up stuff, and you find your friends and their stuff. Same process over and over.
But the devil is in the details. Facebook is what we call a walled garden. Besides the pain of having to sign up for yet another online account (and remember/update your password, and find your friends, etc) you have limited control over how you interact with the site. Facebook can’t go get your pictures from somewhere else. Facebook can’t talk to MySpace or most other sites. You don’t really control your data. And to top it off, Facebook’s terms of service are ridiculous. I found this out when I tried to build a script to update my status on Adium and Facebook at the same time. It’s messed up.
The truth is, Facebook is basically a middle-man who shows you ads and doesn’t play nice with others. You can’t even see someone’s full profile without registering. That’s ok though. We already have the the ultimate social medium ever created. It’s called the web. And some some very smart people at a very smart company are already hard at work on the problem of helping us tie everything together and understand how websites and accounts and people are all related. Those people also help us search it. And as search and site relationships are better understood, you won’t need to have all your friends on the same social site anymore. Plus, we already have some technologies like OpenID and XFN which are helping solve some of the challenges with the decentralized web.
And ultimately, you should have more control over your content and where it gets sent. They’re your pictures, and you own them period. You can register a domain that only you control for < $10 a year and some people will host you for free if you want them to. Notice I said 'if', since they will also give you their software for free and let you host it anywhere, asking nothing else of you because they are that damn cool. Of course, I'm talking about wordpress.com which uses the best web publishing software ever created which already powers 0.8% of all the pages on the web. And your domain should be the hub in your social wheel from where you send your content to whatever other services you want whenever you want. Your domain should be you and you should be your domain.
The good news is smart people already get this. Matt Mullenweg, one of the developers of WordPress, has already said “It’s clear that the future is social.”
In part 3 of this series we will talk about adoption of WordPress as social platform.
Indeed! And with things like iSettings.org on the horizon too Facebook should look out. As with all things that start as one, they need to split into lots of smaller, but more relevant sites on the the web.
I find I have nothing in common with a lot of the people on my fb friends list. It would be good to have a seperate social network for each group of friends: one for work mates, one for school mates, one for karate club and gym club colleagues and so on.
It’s all on the horizon.