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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the analogy. AOL wanted to be the gatekeeper to the Internet and charge users a fee for their "premium" content. They were replaced because the internet is infrastructure, and a million other entities created sites and services that were better than what AOL was trying to charge for.

Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web, and sinks it's hooks in via extremely elegant and lightweight hooks like Login with Facebook and FBJS that have impeccable usability and deliver measurable value to site owners. They are not fighting against current trends, rather they are defining and riding them.

Facebook will not be in trouble until their business model starts to collide with user interests. Privacy concerns are a potential problem for them, but don't fool yourselves that even a sizable minority of users care about that yet.

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Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web

No offense, but I find that to be an odd definition of "open web".

They don't support a distributed protocol and they don't support data portability in any meaningful way.

To rephrase what I think the poster's point was:

AOL wanted to pretend the rest of the net didn't exist. We've seen where that game plan leads: irrelevance.

Facebook, contrariwise, is willing to accept the existence of non-Facebook material on the net, even if the long-term plan is to Borg it.

I didn't say Facebook supports the open web. I said they embrace it (think MS embrace and extend). They don't expect you to stay on Facebook all the time, they give tools to allow Facebook to be on all sites, and they give site owners incentive to use those tools.

I think what you're neglecting is the fact that most of these tools actually further silo your information to Facebook.

Consider Facebook's comments widget for example. Yes there is clear value for the publisher, but your theory starts to fall apart on the other end of the spectrum: Facebook gets to silo all these comments and call them their own. The same principal extends to likes and worse yet, user accounts.

Facebook encouraging publishers to user their profiles, comments, likes, friends, etc. takes all of this data out of the publishers hands. Imho, this is not embracing the open web by any standards.

In regards to your example, yes the data is warehoused in Facebook servers, but the publisher still has access to the raw data:

"Access to raw data: Query all comments via the comments.get API method or the comment FQL table."

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/198

Access, however, is granted at her majesty's pleasure.

I didn't intend to suggest the publisher couldn't access the data. Regardless, I don't think it discredits my point.

Obviously I made a poor choice of words in my original post, but I decided to leave it since it would be unfair to reframe the conversation after the fact.

However by responding to my post you force me to further reiterate the exact same thing once again in no uncertain terms.

At no point did I mean to imply that Facebook is in any way open. If "embrace and extend" does not make that clear then how about The Godfather Part 2 embrace [kiss] of death.

> ... but your theory starts to fall apart ...

Again, my theory is that Facebook is aware of what is going on around it, open or closed, public or private, and uses it to its advantage. And so far, nothing that is "open" or "distributed" is competing in any meaningful way with Facebook. This is very very different from what AOL did.

I work on the Facebook platform team.

Facebook Platform supports OAuth as a standard authentication protocol for 3rd party apps. It also provides APIs that developers can use to export data users have entered into facebook (with the user's permission, of course). What do you think is missing in Facebook's support for data portability?

I want to be able to dump out the photos from all the albums which contain photos of me. The API doesn't let me do this without a hack involving walking all my friends albums.

EDIT: and a full realtime read/write XMPP-style interface for all the data going in/out of my profile please! :)

Check out https://graph.facebook.com/me/photos?access_token=<inser... graph api access token here>

First would be an API to export all of a user's data in a common format. The current solution, where you email a large file in HTML format is not an acceptable solution. Good for archiving, bad for data portability.

Most importantly, though, a clear change (or clear guidelines) to the Terms Of Service which would guarantee that moving your data to a competing service would not result in cancellation of the account or deletion of the new service's API key.

As for a distributed protocol, take a look at the functionality in Appleseed's QuickSocial and StatusNet for an idea of what a distributed protocol entails. I should be able to login to facebook with an external identity, and add someone as a friend on facebook, without having an actual facebook account.

If Facebook is interested in these things, you can have some representatives join the Federated Social Web mailing list, and you can support the W3C working group on federated social networking, as well as supporting the Data Portability Project.

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