“What makes you think facebook isn’t public? This seems like a very nitpicky distinction: calling blogs, twitter, and flickr “public” while facebook is somehow “private” makes almost no sense to me at all.”
Durrr. If you have to sign up to see anything then it is not public. Imagine if you had to sign up to blogger to read blogs, or to wikipedia to read articles. It is all well and good using it if you want to keep your info tightly controlled, but for people who are using it for open, social reasons then it is counter-productive.
We can’t say that Internet is the best way for social networking. The best example is Orkut. I had many school mates. When I was doing my Schooling, internet and e-mail was not that popualar in India. and I’m first time operating with a computer in year 2000. I joined for new courses and my home relocated after that I got job which is another place. So I missed them all. Now I could see many of them in Orkut. It was really a nice place to see people the disadvantage is that many people taking advantage of Orkut website by asking some users to join their services and foolishly they’re entering user name and password. which cause alot of spam in these days. Now daily I;m getting invitation from Jhoos, Jaxter etc… i rejected all those invitation because I satisfied with Orkut. earlier I spent alot of time for posting things finding new groups. but now it’s very less but it’s really nice to keep in touch with all of my friends through this wonderful site. some people loves heavy Orkutting. it’s depends on the person to decide to waster their time or not with some rubbish scrapping.
My only fear of the “Walled Gardens” like Facebook is that information that should be public will be stuck in a private network. I understand not wanting to share your cell phone number with the open internet, but people are writing content in Facebook “notes” that should be public blogs!
But I must admit I loved moving to a new city, clicking on the city network, and seeing 4 friends who I hadn’t spoken with in years that lived in the area. I immediately had people to meet up with in a new city.
Well, you do need a walled garden in case of social networks for privacy’s sake. Social networks like Orkut, allow you to block everyone else other than your friends.
I love your work here Jeff, but this time I strongly disagree with you.
Facebook is not walled in the sense that the AOL of old was. AOL was a fee-based service that tried to contain and abstract the web. This is almost similar to a site like Digg. The internet is so large and unwieldy that it helps to have a place to start. The problem with AOL is that they tried to pretend there was nothing outside of AOL. With the explosion of content all over the ‘real’ internet, people left AOL when they realized they were paying more for less.
Facebook is very different. First of all, it is free. It is not designed to be an aggregation of information, like Wikipedia. Rather, it is intended to be a tool for keeping contact with friends and sharing media. The ‘walls’ you refer to are not meant to keep people inside for the monetary benefit of Facebook, but to protect it’s users from having the fact that they broke up with their girlfriend from being indexed by Google. Facebook users don’t want the information on Facebook to be in the public domain.
Opening up the API, however, is a brilliant move, because it maintains the safety and ease of use of Facebook while providing added, customizable functionality, at almost no cost to the people who run Facebook.
While it may seem that Facebook photos should be on flickr, and Facebook notes should be on a blog, people generally don’t want pictures of their private party indexed for all to see. This not a flaw with Facebook, but an integral component of its success.
Jeff, I couldn’t have said this better myself. Excellent post.
I’ve been plastering my name and my content all over the internet for a decade, but I’m not a member of Facebook because I don’t need to be. My content has plenty of other places it can live, and I can control most of them.
I don’t develop applications for Facebook because I’d rather spend my time developing applications that will benefit EVERYONE on the internet, not just the fragment that uses Facebook.
The code and content in my website’s CMS will be useful long after Facebook becomes MySpace and is overtaken by the next hip social network.
I think you missed the point of the walled garden with facebook… it was able to acheive success because it WAS a walled garden. People put information up there because it is semi-private and they can selectively control who sees what. Facebook integrated these ideas of a blog, twitter, myspace etc and that is why it is successful. I believe that since facebook’s new direction is to be more open and public will be it’s downfall. If you were actually a member of Facebook I think you would see this.
What about discoverability? How do I find people that I know on the internet? Even if they have a blog there’s no guarantee that Google/Yahoo/MSN will consider them “important” enough to own their name?
Ian hits the nail square on the head. The fact that Facebook is free and generally easy to use makes it completely different from AOL. Sure, you can do all the things you could on Facebook using open platforms, but it’s messy, spread across a wide range of disparate programs, and visible to everyone.
There’s a reason that people build walls around their gardens at home–they don’t want too many people peeping in! Facebook at least lets you control who gets to visit your back yard.
I’ve found LinkedIn a fantastic way to stay connected to (or reconnect with) people like former coworkers who you maybe like and respect (possibly quite a lot), but who you wouldn’t normally maintain frequent regular contact with (or gradually lose touch with) after you’ve moved on. You know, a buddy in the tranches who you gradually lost track of after he moved away, or the guy you think about every once in a while and wonder how/what he’s doing now.
Now some people can easily and naturally do that anyway just with email, etc, but I’m not socially adept enough to maintain regular contacts with a dozens of former coworkers several years after departure. Those people move on as well (and their email addrs change), and there’s a better chance that their address in LinkedIn will be current than the one I last used to email a guy 8-12 months ago. Beyond that, the job hunting/recruiting aspects on LinkedIn are just icing, for me. (I do find the occasional invite from strangers a bit odd, though.)
So, for my usage, I don’t see how the open internet with blogs, twitter, etc would serve this purpose.
I echo the comments of the folks that have talked about the advantages of the walled garden: Semi-privacy, spam-filtering and spider-proofing. Additionally, the walled garden is a content filter of sorts. Content on the internet is very uneven in quality. Once I find a source that I trust for quality content, it isn’t practical or desirable for me to continue seeking other sources. I want to stay within the walled garden that appeals to me. Of course, I hope that the garden grows and changes to adjust to what’s happening in the world. If it doesn’t, I’m free to look for other gardens to spend my time in.
A series of walled gardens is what the internet is evolving to. People are realizing that You Tube, blogs and twitter are cool ideas, but the reality is that the low bar to entry produces an abundance of junk. The walled garden becomes a sanctuary from the junk. I believe that some of the most successful internet companies in the future will be ‘micro-media’ companies. Like the mega-media companies (NBC, The McClatchy Company, etc.), they will control the quality and type of content to appeal to a small slice of the internet population. This population will appreciate them for doing that and will pay them by viewing ads or even paying them directly.
For now, social networks are the best way for me to raise the quality of the content that I see on the internet. These social networks point me to the information that I find most interesting, valuable or entertaining.
I think alot of these posts are missing the point. Its not a question whether FaceBook, MySpace, or the others are useful. The question is, especially in the case of the FaceBook API, do we need/want a platform on top of the Internet? Ultimatly, I think all would agree we don’t want one company acting as middle man.
We live in villages, neighborhood. Some people live in countries, but only when they feel nationalist or when they watch the Mondial football games.
So, we mostly live in closed quarters among people we know and understand. Our brain doesn’t function well in wide open spaces. It is a side effect of the human race being born quite lonely, in a few squattered groups in the dry valley of the Rift. We need recognizable faces. Or facebooks. Or just a magazine called Us with frontpage photos of… us, or People, with images of… faces. Well, people.
I too resisted Facebook until I got the 3rd invite. But not because of the noble reasons you uphold more because I don’t need any more distractions and I hated the fact that I couldn’t see what it was really about until I logged in. But the 3rd invite hit hard and the herd mentality clicked in and I joined up like a good sheep.
But I’m not convinvced I’ll be continuing to use it because the only feature I liked about facebook was the ‘Steve is …’ feature which allows me to share my pain/joy with my friends. I hadn’t seen Twitter until now and it’s all that I want because all I have to do is use my Jabber client. Now I have to ween my friends off of Facebook. Hmmm.
Aaron - It’s not that Facebook is revolutionary in it’s technology, it’s that it has a different culture about it. The other popular sites - myspace and beebo - smack of young-teenagers who have music automatically blaring out of their psychedelically coloured page. Facebook, by contrast, is much more restrained as it doesn’t allows heavy customisation and as such breeds a different user base that captures a lot of the people who wouldn’t use the other services. That user base just happens to loosely overlap with the more technical minded sector of the internet communities.
The services and products that get popular are the ones that manage to take an old but still relatively new idea and package it in a more palatable way. Just because it’s not completely new in it’s features doesn’t mean that it’s not different and revolutionary in it’s presentation, marketing, feel or user base.
I don’t know about Facebook or other generic social networking sites, but I wouldn’t lump LinkedIn with them. LinkedIn is a social networking site with a purpose. Which is all it takes for a social networking site to be of any use, really.
And the platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else isn’t the Internet, it’s the real world. At least, that’s in theory. But saying that social networking sites cannot compete with the Internet is like saying that real-life meting places cannot compete with the world.
Most times things like the local user group, the local pub, the local whatever, are much more convenient than interfacing with the whole world. I don’t need the whole world, I only need a small subset of like-minded people.
Plus, joining a social networking site, IMO, gives a pretty good excuse to contact other people. On the Internet, I don’t expect to be emailed or IMd by a random person, just as in the real world i don’t expect to be chatted up on the street. But I surely would expect to be chatted up by a member of one of the groups I belong to at a group meeting.
I have been trying to avoid these “walled gardens” for years now. Seems like I can never explain why I don’t want to join to others and end up caving and joining.
Thank you for the articulate post that conveys my thoughts!
hmmm… what has this person (who admits he doesn’t like social networking sites) and his feeling that social networking and password protected web sites are doomed because of AOL and the internet as a whole, got to do with the real issues of privacy of information?
It seems evident to me that sites like Face Book show we as an online society are:
moving towards the USA’s view on private/public information collection;
becoming happier to accept more info rather than less, and self-sensor;
evaluating the positive aspects of the advancement of online storage and file sharing;
to name but 3 very important sociological issues.
It is my understanding that these ideas alone are far more likely to drive the progress of social network and private/public portals than whether ‘social networking’ as an entity resembles a failed attempt at networking previously (which also happened to exclude the very important provision of API’s did it not (correct me if I’m wrong).