Boycott the Button (Facebook Connect) | Hacker News Reader

Boycott the Button (Facebook Connect)

blog.jakerlevine.com

31 pointsjrlevine15 comments

It’s getting a little scary. I’m at the point where I would rather spend 5 minutes filling out a new profile than log into a third party site using Facebook Connect. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook Connect is a great tool (for Facebook) and I appreciate the gesture of interoperability, but I can’t help but see it as the single greatest threat to the future of the social web.

Open articleView on HN

I don't see the issue here. Anyone who beats Facebook is going to have to offer nearly all of Facebook's features and some killer-app features of its own. So any Facebook-killer will make it similarly easy to integrate a FBKiller-Connect feature.

And the ramp up of any Facebook-Killer is going to be months or years. In that intervening few years, people will be dual-networked: they'll be using the new network with their friends who have the new network, and they'll be using Facebook for the friends that haven't switched or for legacy features (Farmville), sort of like now, where many people have both a Facebook and a MySpace.

And given the existing fundamental lock-in of the network effects, I don't think Facebook Connect is the largest hurdle someone plotting a Facebook-Killer has to overcome.

The point here is not necessarily to protect a potential "Facebook Killer," but rather to protect any service that wants and deserves its own piece of the social web. This isn't about duplicating Facebook's feature set but improving on it.

Anyone who beats Facebook is going to have to offer nearly all of Facebook's features and some killer-app features of its own. So any Facebook-killer will make it similarly easy to integrate a FBKiller-Connect feature.

Examples of this? Mature market leaders are not usually unseated by someone out-doing what they do best. They get blindsided by new approaches or market shifts. No one is going to out-Facebook Facebook, their engineering operations are truly truly amazing. The agility they demonstrate at that scale is mind-blowing, making Google's operations look easy by comparison. That doesn't mean they are invulnerable, just that a head-on attack isn't likely to succeed.

Mature Market leaders don't usually have the network effect lock-ins that Facebook has. In a traditional market, I'll swap to the new Product (Product X) as long as Product X does a decent job on the features I use in the original product and something new that makes it better for me.

The problem is that a Facebook-Killer has to be able to attract everyone at once, because of the network effects. It can't just be better than Facebook for me, it has to be better than Facebook for most of my friends (who use completely different subsets of the Facebook features), because I'm not switching unless they do. The end result is that the Facebook-Killer, in order to build its network effects, has to have replicated features and new features that make it better than Facebook for a large segment of the population.

A traditional app-killer can duplicate the most used 40-50% of the App's features and toss in a new revolutionary feature, and it'll take off (since most people don't use App's features that AppKiller didn't implement). However, Facebook is like Word - most people only use 20% of the features, but everyone uses a different 20%. So if you want to grab even a third of Facebook's users, you have to re-implement 60% or more of Facebook's features in addition to your killer features.

The network effect only reinforces my point, I fail to see what you're getting at.

The Facebook Connect button at the bottom of this post was the best part.

Quite ironic, especially since 'Login via Twitter' seems to be disabled while Facebook aint.

I pressed The Button. It was quite a disappointment.

The Facebook Connect cross-domain receiver URL (http://blog.jakerlevine.com/post/366422034/boycott-the-butto...) must be in the same domain or be in a subdomain of an application's base domain (www.jakerlevine.com). You can configure the base domain in the application's settings.

I'd like to say it was broken on purpose to make my point...clearly I make a poor revolutionary. (Updated to include OpenID and Twitter)

I'm bad a replying to comments. There are far too many places I comment. Google Wave needs to hurry up and get released!

Anyways, I didn't even check. I just saw it, and it was highly amusing.

I should also point out that I didn't say you were wrong. =) It really was just very, very amusing in light of the post.

Some battles have a winner, publishers are no more likely to stop adopting FB connect then they are to start inserting robots no-follow.

Google won the (general) search battle and it's nigh impossible for a young innovative start-up to beat them. Facebook are beginning to assume Google-esque dominance, and no start-up looks at all likely to displace them.

In the end ease of use wins every time.

Of course, someone would have said the same thing about IBM a few decades ago, or Internet Explorer 8-10 years ago. And they were saying it about Yahoo and Altavista and MySpace before Facebook and Google came along.

Well said - I would argue that what is at stake here is far more immediate than any of the 'fights' mentioned above. User choice in the examples above refer to service use. In a war for the social web, what is at stake is the way user identity is represented online.

Sure. And they did say those things. And the sites that genuinely cared about user needs, both past and present? They did the 'inefficient' thing. They optimized for whatever was best-of-breed at the time (IE, FBConnect) for ease of use, then found a way to also cater to whatever came up next. Many headaches were caused by IE/Firefox incompatibility, but Firefox is still gaining marketshare today.

Reminds me of Chris Messina's talk “Identity is the Platform”.

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/10/01/video-of-my-talk-ident...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com