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.
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.
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.
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?
EDIT: and a full realtime read/write XMPP-style interface for all the data going in/out of my profile please! :)
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.
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.
"Access to raw data: Query all comments via the comments.get API method or the comment FQL table."
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.