Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

So, what does the future look like?

Will everyone abandon Facebook en masse, just like they did AOL and Myspace? Or did Facebook really win?

Will Google finally do something interesting in the space?

Will any of these open source distributed/federated interoperative social networks catch on? All of them?

I sort of hope for a combination the last two. It doesn't look like any of the big players have an incentive to open up and become interoperable, and it doesn't look like any of the new open/distributed upstarts are getting any sort of real traction. Google's the only big player that has a history of demonstrating a willingness to push open/distributed/interoperable data because an open web is a crawlable web is an advertisable web.

Once the social networking/identity thing is more open and distributed, I imagine networks like Facebook becoming more like a place to go to hang out with certain people and share certain things, with various other places for different contexts and different appropriate activities, and different degrees of privacy, but all working from a single, centralized identity.

What's the advantage of open information in the context of social applications? Excluding of course social networks built on mutual interest, like twitter or quora. With real-world friends, family, contacts, etc., the closed nature of facebook is what makes it attractive to me. And I think that's true for most users. It's probably why there's massive outrage every time they relax their privacy defaults.

Maybe data portability? But data on facebook is portable enough, and even if it weren't, what are you going to import it in? Some hypothetical future rival social network? I imagine for a majority of users, simply viewing a friend's profile to remember an email address, phone number, etc, is enough.

I think privacy is actually a good reason for strong data portability. If users can easily leave your service for another, you have a strong incentive not to violate their privacy expectations. To extrapolate that point out: strong data portability and interoperability encourage a competitive environment.

I think you're conflating "closed" with "private." An open social networking environment can still harbor private (I would argue more private) sharing contexts.

You're absolutely right, I did conflate 'closed' and 'private'.

But what about my second point? You can download your facebook data. Or is it not 'strongly portable' enough, in your opinion?

From what I understand, it's not an easy process and you can't download important stuff, like your social graph (I think you only get plaintext names, not email addresses, etc.)

It's a one click download. OK, actually two clicks, but it's a very clean, unconfusing process. https://www.facebook.com/download/

Not to mention the graph api. They're very good about giving you all the information you as a user might want (photos, links, messages, wall posts) What it doesn't give you is the kind of data that a competitor might want.

You should try it. http://www.facebook.com/download. It's basically a two-click process.

It gives you most of the data you'd be interested in as a user (photos, videos, messages, wall posts). Not so much the data that Google might want, like a easily importable graph. But for everyone else, it's really useful.

I think it is still quite likely that Facebook could implode spectacularly in the same way that Digg did. It would take longer for their company to unwind (due to the huge number of users) but once the momentum is lost other platforms will have a chance to prosper. The (presumed) forthcoming IPO and the events around it will be interesting times for everyone, I think.

I find this unlikely because FB is much more mainstream, pervasive, and locked-in than Digg has ever been.

Honestly, I kinda hope you're right, though.

I understand your point. But I truly believe that it's possible for an entity of any size to collapse.

In fact, I think that it is so rare for any kind of organisation to get so big as to dominate (say) 90% of its market that there has never really been much chance to pass on knowledge about how to handle problems at that extreme scale. It might even make you more likely to fail if you get too big.

Maybe I should wait a few years and then write "The History of the Decline and Fall of Facebook" in the spirit of Gibbon :-)

People left AOL whenthe web grew around it and AOL's relatively sparse content lost its appeal.

Are you implying that that won't or can't happen with Facebook? Isn't that sort of the point of TFA?

The web that knocked AOL's wall down was already there when Facebook started getting big.

The web is as a roaring ocean; AOL and Facebook are as but sandcastles on the shore; waves come in, waves go out, and no sandcastle is forever safe.

I think people will start to see that social networks don't add that much value to their lives, and they'll just stop using them. Maybe they'll meet up with friends for a chat, instead of sitting at home talking to each other online.

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