Google vs Facebook
October 11th, 2007
Facebook has striken fear not only into the hearts of incumbent dot-com billionaires, but also into the hearts of open data freaks. It’s terrifying me - not least, because I use it.
I give the most personal, sensitive information that I have to a private US corporation. I have no way of getting the data out, even to back it up. I don’t even pay them for an expected level of service. Yet I still do it, simply because my friends are on there.
Brad Fitzpatrick, who started the blogging-site-before-the-word-blog LiveJournal, is worried about this, and has a plan to do something about it.
Currently if you’re a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on …….. People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.
(from Brad Fitzpatrick’s site)
Of course, you can just make a Facebook application. But, Brad Fitzpatrick again, that isn’t the wisest thing to do.
Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there’s a lot of hesitation in the developer / “Web 2.0″ community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded.
So instead, Brad is going to make an API, and a set of non-profit run servers. And write a bunch of open source software. And build some alliances. He needs your help, oh lovers of open platforms and controlling your own data. There’s even a Google group to join.
Oh yes, that reminds me, the twist.
Brad Fitzpatrick now works for Google. And there’s a rumour that Google are going to release a social networking API on November 5th. Expect some fireworks.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:42 am
[…] Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation posts about how Brad Fitzpatrick, ex Six Apart and now with Google, plans to open up the social graph (the connections between people that build social networks). Currently the now-numerous social networks all operate as walled gardens; the ultimate goal of Brad’s project is, via a a non-profit and open source software to: make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as “the” central graph owner. […]
October 11th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Thanks for the pingback Nick though in the interests of modesty I should mention that this post was authored by Francis Irving and not myself!
Francis is definitely highlighting an important issue and one with strong connections to the open service debate we’ve been having.
October 16th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
dear Francis, I am glad to read this. I dug out some notes recently on the last attempt at “social network” model exchange standardisation. The assumptions that Brad et.al. are running on concern me, too, and this reassures me that speculations about the Gogole Social Graph aren’t just paranoia
October 16th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
[…] Exposing cleanly another layer of information, rendering it that much easier to hook into other information resources… the pressure in the structural design doesn’t go away. We can “democratise” this layer of “social graph” services all we like, but they will go the way of independent ISPs and free web hosting and email providers, unless we find a way of building them that hasn’t involved papering over the cracks exposed in all the underlying layers. In the meantime I, for one, welcome our Google Social Graph. […]
November 7th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
[…] My last post here, Google vs. Facebook, was about how our own personal knowledge, that you’ve put into social networks like Facebook or MySpace, should also be open. By this I mean that you should have control of it, and it should be encoded in open formats with open protocols. The last week there’s been lots of progress on this. […]