The Open Social Network

We've got social networks with lots of users, like MySpace, Beebo, Facebook, etc, and we've got open social networks like Marc Canter's People Aggregator and Marc Andreessen's Ning. But we really don't yet have an open social network with a lot of users.

Facebook took a step in that direction when they opened their platform, but it's not totally open. I can't update my Facebook status message with Twitter the way I'd like to. And Netvibes' cool new widget that runs my Facebook profile inside of Netvibes doesn't import my Facebook news feed into Netvibes.

Dave Winer has been thinking about the state of the platform this week and here's his take on Facebook.

To all vendors who are tuned in, look for ways you're keeping your users from managing their own data. The users are getting educated, fast. Better to be on the right side of this one.

Facebook could easily be the place where the dam breaks. It's attracting so many users, who may at some point realize that they want control of the data that's locked up inside Facebook. Then vendors who have been on the right side of this issue will be the heroes.

I wish it were so, but most of Facebook's traditional users (like my two daughters) don't care that their data is locked up in Facebook. I'll show them my Facebook running in Netvibes when they wake up this morning and they'll say "that's nice dad but why would you want to do that?".

I don't see a Facebook rebellion happening anytime soon. The Techcrunch 50,000 might leave when they realize that they can do most, if not everything, that they do in Facebook on the web on a platform they control. But that won't make a dent in Facebook's core audience.

But it may make a dent in where the web development steam is directed. Right now there's a ton of development effort focused on Facebook. Will that effort stay there? That's a different question and one I can't answer right now. But it's something I am watching closely.

Comments

[Steven Loi]

Hi Fred,

I've been a recent follower of your blog (probably for the last 6 months now)and I enjoy your entries. I especially like this one because the thoughts in this entry are ones that have been crossing my mind for the last 6 weeks or so. Right now, my team (I'm the business guy, the rest of the team is all CS guys) are building an FB app for client and are focused on strategies to not be completely powerless if Facebook decides one day to pull the plug or tweak the rules to the f8 platform. Certainly they will have the option to control whatever they wish which is quite scary.

- Steve

[Steven Loi]

Hi Fred,

I've been a recent follower of your blog (probably for the last 6 months now)and I enjoy your entries. I especially like this one because the thoughts in this entry are ones that have been crossing my mind for the last 6 weeks or so. Right now, my team (I'm the business guy, the rest of the team is all CS guys) are building an FB app for client and are focused on strategies to not be completely powerless if Facebook decides one day to pull the plug or tweak the rules to the f8 platform. Certainly they will have the option to control whatever they wish which is quite scary.

- Steve

[Fred]

Fred, I think what you're seeing we can now identify as a routine lifecycle of on-line media. First people sign up with a walled garden because it's EASY and because the walled garden is, essentially, the provision of value across a number of dimensions directly to the user. E.g., because of the size of FB, all of my friends are already here! Hooray!

And then we gradually see those users grow up, and realize that the true social network is the open system of the Internet itself.

The major signposts are:

(1) 1980s: The popularity and then demise of Bitnet (there was a time when it seemed this would be the public network, rather than the ArpaNet per se). Other proprietary WANs would go here as well. The lifecycle happens first in infrastructure.

(2) 1990s: AOL.

(3) mid-2000's: Facebook.

The irony is that apps that are built into Facebook that try to create bridges over the Facebook wall will ultimately destroy Facebook as it dawns on FB users that the wall is just too high . . .

There is also a countervailing force -- e.g., companies like Google looking at the establishment of their own "private Internets" to provide better QoS which we've already seen with niche apps such as online screen-sharing applications, certain audio apps, certain financial systems, etc. But you will pay for these.

[Dave Winer]

Fred, I had the same conversation with a 24 year old friend a few days ago, and things change a lot as kids grow up, through college and then graduate. I don't know how old your kids are, but I wouldn't expect things to remain that way for them, not based on what I was told and what I remember of my own life.

When you're college age your whole world is the college. You don't know anywhere near as many people as people our age do, and they don't come from as diverse places and times. Being locked into people you know from college seems just fine because those are the only people you know who you care to be connected to.

This doesn't exactly make sense to me, but in a loose way it does. I remember college both as being fun and awkward. I also remember what it was like when I first went out into the world on my own and how naive I was before I did that. Translate that into today's context, college is a place where you practice living, but you're not really doing it yet. So ir the networks the kids use are just sandboxes, simulations of the real thing, why should that be a surprise?

We don't have a lot of context to judge their experience, but then we have better context in some ways than they do, because we made the transition out of the sandbox, and they haven't yet. Don't be so sure that what they value today will be what they value when they grow up. That's what my young friend told me, and it's been confirmed (I checked it out with a 26 year old CTO at a moderately successful software startup).

Anyway I didn't say it would happen for sure, nothing is for sure except death and taxes. But I've seen dams break before that people thought never would. Young people are smart, they'll figure out when and iff their independence matters to them.

[Michael Bailey]

Fred, I really like your blog and have started looking forward to reading it daily.

You mention interactivity between FB and Twitter, so I counter with this:

Really now, I cannot go to my local hardware store to pay my utility bill - why not?

Two separate business entities - so are FB and Twitter. Why should I expect them to work together? Just because they can?

As a developer in the new media space, I see things differently, and hopefully not like some cat chasing the shiny light of a laser pointer.

What if another service comes along - do I need to stay up all night coding so that the new service can work with my existing platform?

Where does it end?

AOL did what they did because 80% of their member-base simply doesn't care or understand that they are in a walled garden.

The last couple of years have shown me that I don't need to go around asking questions; I see now that I'm one of the people who should be providing the answers instead.

[Dave Winer]

Fred, there's another way to look at it...

How could the guy who backed Bug Labs *not* see the opportunity to zig where everyone else is zagging??

You're a paradox to me Fred. In many ways you have the same limits every other VC I've ever met has (and I've been around a long time) but on the other hand, you seem to have an intuitive understanding that escapes so many of them (i.e. yourself).

There is an opportunity to be not just on the right side when the dam breaks, but to be the catalyst for the dam breaking, as Borland was in the 80s for the breaking of copy protection. They grew to become one of the giants by simply taking the user's side when the rest of the industry was taking advantage of the users.

It may make some sense to look at things generationally, I've argued with you before about this (hopefully in a friendly way), but it may make more sense to look at the cycles of technology, patterns that never seem to break. First the technology is hard and new and the users need help. THen the technology becomes familiar, everyday. Sometiees it takes a generationsl shift to make this so. THen the dam breaks, it becomes everyday, and something else takes its place. The Internet was another of these. Read my dated piece, Bill Gates vs the Internet (1994) to see how strange those moments are. (You probably remember.)

[Scott Rafer]

Rebellions are fun to contemplate but exceedingly rare. Open social networks will arise and dominate over the next five to seven years. However, it won't be because normal people suddenly understand what we in the left-wing of the vendor community (which includes DaveW whether he likes it or not) believes is good for them.

Open social networks will show up and grow up when some startup figures out how to exploit the inherent strategic and economic advantages of openness to provide a radically better service than Facebook or whatever network is then dominant.

[David Novakovic]

@Michael Bailey : Unfortunately the consumer calls the shots, you lose on this one :) (i'm a dev, so i feel your pain)

@Fred : My current startup is developing a platform which provides social networking features, but with a very heavy focus on semantic/conceptual analysis. We steer clear of the social networking tag because we are chasing a slightly different demographic. The network is completely open in every aspect, just like the internet should be. We don't think that the business value comes from a walled garden, in fact... the more open it can be, the more it encourages people to be creative. Ultimately if our technology becomes an integral part of someone else's killer mashup, that can only be of benefit to us. We are the moss that grows between the rocks, we don't hold them together, but make it look nicer and add a bit of colour. Don't fight it :)

We are in the pitch/beg stages at the moment now. The seed/vc scene over here (Australia) is very conservative, so we are making every attempt to knock everyone we talk to dead. But times are changing :)

on a side note, I had someone misread my blurb at a pitch the other day, and introduced me as someone talking about "biogs." Nice icebreaker.

[Dave Winer]

Scott, you're right, I've been wrong about so many things! :-)

These things come in cycles. I swear you or someone like you was around when the web was starting up, saying that Borland or Taligent was going to rule the network stack, no matter what left wingers like Dave Winer say.

Or people who said the number of people who want to blog is in the two or three digits, at most.

Or the people who said Everyone Knows that there will be three or four websites when all is said and done, no matter what that crazy left wing blogger, Dave Winer, says.

There's always someone who makes it personal, uses someone else as a foil to say that people will always use candles to light their parlors (never mind that people don't have parlors anymore).

And I almost forgot, when I was a grad student and told people I was interested in these personal computer things, they said that's for left wing people like Dave Winer.

Scott whether you like it or not, all these things we call computers are about freedom, not lock-in. We temporarily get tethered to vendors when a technology is new, because we don't understand it. But there are two forces that work against lock-in, that are inexorable, and if you don't see them, you're doomed to fail. 1. People learn as they use, and 2. New people come along to whom the new way is second nature. This means that eventually what was mysterious becomes familiar. That'll happen with identity too, bet on it. And that's not left wing. (What are you, right wing??)

[DeVer Warner]

On the money Fred. The TC50k (great classification, by the way) and the majority of Facebook critics seem to be ignorant of the motives of the real Facebook audience. Facebook isn't about a bunch of 30-somethings streamlining their online social lives or messing around with clumsy, two-bit applications. It's about millions upon millions of teenagers and 20-somethings procrastinating - defining their identities (on their terms) and looking at others'. For most, it's simply the online equivalent of "people watching".

[Elroy Jetson]

What will happen is the same thing that is happening to MySpace.

MySpace is difficult to use and terrible to navigate and communicate on. So everyone jumped to Facebook. It was cleaner and easier. Now that its opened up it is becoming a slightly cleaner MySpace.

As soon as someone takes the Apple approach to usability and makes doing things simple and changes the paradigm from the network as the focus to the user as the focus, everyone will again start to jump ship.

[Karl]

If I was to make a bet on the future and where it was pointed, I wouldn't bet against Dave Winer's opinion on this.

I'd also bet that there won't be a Facebook rebellion happening anytime soon either, because they seem a forward thinking bunch and will move towards freedom for their users long before it becomes an issue.

[Jamie]

Fred, I really don't see any major "revolution" coming out of facebook users. What I do see is a mass defection by their users sometime in the future. Just like what is happening to MySpace right now.
Most people are happy with facebook the way it is just like they were happy with MySpace in the recent past.
No one had any real problem with the fact that they couldn't move their data out of MySpace when they moved to the next "place to be"(FaceBook). They just duplicated what they wanted and discarded the rest.
When the next "place to be" comes along I predict that people will do the same.

[jack phelps]

Isn't that what the blogosphere means? I mean, at what point are you satisfied with your ability to control what you can do unless you're controlling the entire platform? Or are you saying you want the apple computer of social networks, which feels open because it's tuned tightly as such but is really in no way open?

But really what you're asking for is a wall on the web where you can post anything you want and people can be your friend via a simple mnemonic, and hey, it looks to me like AVC is just that, no?

[Julie Pearson]

I have tried all the social networks. I actually like Congoo the best because I use it for news. The other ones are either too noisy or too young. My profile is here: http://www.congoo.com/user/publicprofile?profile_id=1665525

[Michael Bernstein]

I know I'm repeating what a few folks have said already, but I'm sticking my two cents in anyway.

Facebook is AOL. I do not mean this in a derogatory way. AOL was a hugely successful business (and platform) that stayed a walled garden for a very long time. Only when the aggregate value of what was outside the garden wall exceeded what was inside (PLUS the shift to broadband of the most desirable advertising demographics AND the dotbomb crash) did AOL lose it's market power (and even that only happened after it ate or destroyed all of it's walled-garden competitors like Compuserve and Prodigy).

I expect Facebook (or perhaps some other player, it really is too early to call this) will likely follow a similar trajectory, and that (in keeping with the times) it will happen a bit faster this time around, but that isn't to say that FB isn't going to enjoy a lot of success over the next few years before an open alternative wins, or even that the dominant player won't decide to cannibalize it's own market and end up creating that open alternative.

[Gordon R. Vaughan]

I guess the real question is, which group is at the leading edge of social networks? So far it's been teens and college students, but the eager acceptance of Facebook by older folks is making me wonder if that will change.

The group at the leading edge will see the value of unlocking/user control of data before most do. If Facebook is really a platform, as they say, they'll continue to give users more control, and we'll likely continue to see innovative new applications.

It seems that the other big question is whether we'll end up with just one big network (actually one "polite" network and various trashy ones) and a bunch of specialized ones, or perhaps an oligarchy of several large networks that have to learn to share data with each other.

[Shahar Nechmad]

Hi Sean.
I think you right about the fact that most users really don't care about the fact that their data is locked. In order to get them moving away to another social network you need a much more powerful motivator.
In the past I played with the idea of a new concept I call "The open business". Your post reminded me of it. You can read more about it in my blog (easier to write in than in this comments text box :))
http://nechmads.typepad.com/startup_diaries/2007/08/the-open-busine.html

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