Today WSJ announced that it has built a news publishing platform that lives inside Facebook - effectively outsourcing their core website to the Social Networking Giant.
The number of reasons this is a bad idea is staggering. I’ve tried to summarize them in a spreadsheet comparing a FB approach verses an Open Web approach.
Please feel free to contribute
Read MoreJust wanted to share with you here that I wrote a guest post on Mashable last week about Facebook’s world view. Be sure to check it out here.
Read MoreAre these blunders a series of accidental missteps (a combination of ambition, scale and hubris) or a calculated risk to force their world view on unsuspecting users (easier to ask for forgiveness)? Only the executives at Facebook can ever truly answer this question.
What’s clear, though, is that their platform is tightly coupled with countless other websites and applications across the web, and their financial success is aligned with many influential investors and actors. At this stage, and at this rate, their continued success is all but assured.
But so is the success of the rest of the web. Countless social applications emerge every day and the rest of the web is, and always will be, bigger than any proprietary platform. Through its action and inaction, Facebook offers opportunities for us all. And in the dance between their moves and the rest of the web’s, innovation can be found.
The only thing that can truly hurt the web is a monopoly on ideas, and the only ones who can let that happen are web users themselves.
I have published a guest post on RWW about Facebook’s recent privacy challenges and their claims about data portability.
Read More“The lack of honesty and clarity from the company and its representatives … and the continued trend of taking established language – such as “open technology” or “data portability” – and corrupting it for its own marketing purposes, is far more disconcerting than the boundaries it’s pushing with its technology choices.”
Last week Elias Bizannes and I wrote a post Assessing the Openness of Facebook’s ‘Open Graph Protocol’.
To summarize that post, it’s clear that Facebook is making a play to create, aggregate and own not only identity on the web, but everything that hangs off it. From Interests to Engagement – not just on their .com but across all sites. To do this they are giving publishers token value (analytics and traffic) to take over parts of the page with pieces of Facebook.com without giving them complete access to the user , their data or the user experience (all at the exclusion of any other player). In addition, they are building a semantic map of the Internet that will broker interests and data on a scale never before seen anywhere.
In the face of such huge momentum and stunningly effective execution (kudos to them!), aiming for (or using the word) Open is no longer enough. The web community needs to up it’s game.
The same is true for data portability – the group and the idea. Data portability is no longer enough. We must raise the bar and start to aim for Interoperable Data Portability.
Interoperability means that things work together without an engineer first having to figure out what’s on the other end of an API call.
When you request ‘http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com’ it isn’t enough that the data is there, or that that its ‘open’ or ‘accessible’. No. The reason the web works is because the browser knows exactly how to request the data (HTTP) and how the data will be returned (HTML/CSS/JS). This is an interoperable transaction.
Anyone could write a web server, create a web page, or develop a web browser and it just works. Point the browser somewhere else, and it continues to work.
Now map this to the social web. Anyone could (should be able to) build an open graph, create some graph data, and point a social widget to it and it just works. Point the social widget somewhere else, and it continues to work.
As you can see from the mapping above, the interaction between a social widget and it’s social graph should be the same as that of a browser and a web-server. Not just open, but interoperable, interchangeable and standardized.
Why? Innovation.
The same kind of innovation we get when we have cutting edge web servers competing to be the best damned web server they can be (IIS vs. Apache), and cutting edge websites (Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Google vs. Every other site on the Internet) and cutting edge browsers (Netscape vs. IE vs. Safari vs. Chrome). These products were able to compete for their part in the stack.
Imagine if we got stuck with IIS, Netscape and Altavista locking down the web with their own proprietary communication channels. The web would have been no better than every closed communication platform before it. Slow, stale and obsolete.
How do we become interoperable? It’s hard. Really hard. Those of us who manage products at scale know its easy to make closed decisions. You don’t have to be an evil mastermind – you just have to be lazy. Fight against being lazy. Think before you design, develop or promote your products – try harder. I don’t say this just to you, I say it to myself as well. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else out there developing product. We must all try harder.
Open standards are a start, but open protocols are better. Transactions that, from start to finish, provide for Discoverability, Connectivity and Exchange of data using well known patterns.
The standards groups have done a lot of work, but standards alone don’t solve the problem. It requires product teams to implement the standards and this is an area I am far more interested in these days. How do we implement these patterns at scale.
Customers (i.e. Publishers) must also demand interoperable products. Products that not just connect them to Facebook or Twitter but rather make them first class nodes on the social web.
Like we said on the DataPortability blog:
In order for true interoperable, peer-to-peer data portability to win, serious publishers and other sites must be vigilant to choose cross-platform alternatives that leverage multiple networks rather than just relying on Facebook exclusively.
In this way they become first-class nodes on the social web rather than spokes on Facebook’s hub.
But this is just the start. This just stems the tide by handing the keys to more than one player so that no one player kills us while the full transition to a true peer-to-peer model takes place.
If the web is to truly stay open and interoperable, we need to think bigger and better than just which big company (s) we want to hand our identities to.
Just like every site on the web today can have its own web server, every site should also have the choice to host (or pick) its own social server. Every site should become a fully featured peer on the social web. There is no reason why CNN can not be just as functional, powerful, effective and interchangeable as Facebook.com.
If we don’t, we will be stuck with the IIS, IE and Netscape’s of the social web and innovation will die.
Read MoreMarshall Kirkpatrick has written a thoughtful piece over on Read/Write Web entitled ‘Facebook and the future of Free Thought‘ in which he explains the hard facts about news consumption and the open subscription models that were supposed to create a more open playing field for niche voices.
In it, he states that news consumption has barely changed in the last 10 years. RSS and Feed Readers drive very little traffic and most people still get their news from hand selected mainstream portals and destination sites (like MSN News and Yahoo news etc). In other words, mainstream users do not curate and consume niche subscriptions and are quite content to read what the mainstream sites feed them.
This is troubling news (pun intended) for those of us who believe that the democratization of publishing might open up the world to niche voices and personalized story-telling.
Marshall goes on to argue that Facebook might be our last hope. That since everyone spends all their time in Facebook already, that the service has an opportunity to popularize the notion of subscribing to news sources and thereby bring to life our collective vision of personalized news for the mainstream. Facebook already does a great deal of this with users getting large amounts of news and links from their friends as they share and comment on links.
Through my work with APML I have long dreamed of a world where users are able to view information through a highly personalized lens – a lens that allows them to see personally relevant news instead of just popular news (note that Popularity is a factor of personal relevancy, but it is not the only factor). That doesn’t mean the news would be skewed to one persuasion (liberal or conservative for example) but rather to a specific topic or theme.
Could Facebook popularize personalized news? Should it? Do we really want a closed platform to dictate how the transports, formats and tools of next generation story-telling get built? If so, would we simply be moving the top-down command and control systems of network television and big media to another closed platform with its own limitations and restrictions?
Personalized news on closed platforms are almost as bad as mainstream news on closed platforms. News organizations and small niche publishers both need a way to reach their audience using open technologies or we are doomed to repeat the homogenized news environment of the last 2 decades. The one that failed to protect us from a war in Iraq, failed to innovate when it came to on-demand, and failed to allow each of us to customize and personalize our own news reading tools.
That’s why technologies like RSS/Atom, PubSubHub and others are so important.
What’s missing now is a presentation tool that makes these technologies sing for the mainstream.
So far, as an industry, we’ve failed to deliver on this promise. I don’t have the answers for how we might succeed. But succeed we must.
Perhaps established tier 1 media sites have a role to play. Perhaps market forces that are driving them to cut costs and innovate will drive these properties to turn from purely creating mainstream news editorially toward a model where they curate and surface contributions from their readership and the wider web.
In other words, Tier 1 publishers are being transformed from content creators to content curators – and this could change the game.
In the race to open up and leverage social and real-time technologies, these media organizations are actually making way for the most effective democratization of niche news yet.
Niche, personalized news distributed by open news hubs born from the ‘ashes’ of old media.
Don’t like the tools one hub gives you? Switch to another. the brands we all know and love have an opportunity to become powerful players in the news aggregation and consumption game. Will they respond in time?
Due to my experience working with Tier 1 publishers for Echo, I have high hopes for many of them to learn and adapt. But much more work still remains.
Learn more about how news organizations are practically turning into personalized news curation hubs over on the Echo Blog.
Read MoreI give Facebook a lot of crap. But I don’t think their latest privacy changes are all that nefarious.
It’s pretty obvious what they are doing. They want search inventory to sell to Google and Microsoft. They want to be as cool as Twitter.
I think the more important story is that they are turning their square into a triangle.
A well placed friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) gave me this metaphor (I will try not to butcher it too much).
Twitter is like a triangle. Small group of people (on top) broadcasting to a large group of people down bottom.
Facebook is/was more like a square. Everyone communicating more or less as equal peers (at least on their own personal profile pages).
This is very rare on the internet. It’s rare anywhere really. It’s unusual to have a platform that encourages so much ‘public’ peer-2-peer participation.
It’s clear, however, that Facebook is trying to have its cake and eat it too. They want to be a triangle for those who want one, and a square for those who want one of those.
Will it work? Maybe. They are a ‘Social Utility’ after all. They have never thought of themselves as a vertical social network with a static social contract. As I’ve said before, their ability to change and evolve at scale is beyond impressive. It has never been seen before.
From College kid profile pages, to app platform, to stream platform, to stream platform with deep identity and routing. Their flexibility, rate of change and reinvention is staggering. They put Madonna and Michael Jackson to shame.
Ultimately Facebook wants to be the Microsoft Outlook and Google Adsense of the Social Web all rolled into one. Maybe throw some PayPal in for good measure.
To do this I think you will see them continue to provide square or triangle options for their users (with their own personal bias towards triangles) and deprecate legacy parts of their system like canvas pages and groups.
Ultimately, though, the real opportunity is to look beyond the public vs. private debate and observe the ‘Multiple Publics’ that Danah Boyd and Kevin Marks speak about. But that’s a post for another day.
Is this good or bad for us? I’m not sure it matters. It’s another big bet for the company though, and it was a necessary step to clean up the half steps that resulted in privacy setting hell on the service so far.
Read MoreSteve Gillmor often writes fantastic (and fantastically long) editorials on the landscape of the real-time web, but they are often very dense and sometimes fail to cover some key points. I thought I would take the liberty of translating and correcting his latest post with my own contributions.
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.
Translation: The FriendFeed team were absorbed by way of acquisition. Twitter has terminated their priority access to Twitter data because FriendFeed is now owned by Twitter’s primary competitor.
Correction: Of course Twitter turned them off. Facebook is Twitter’s self-declared number one competitor. When you own the platform and the protocol you have every right to protect your own arse. In fact they have an obligation to their shareholders and investors.
What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?
Translation: Most commentators think that FriendFeed is dead because the founders have been bought by and buried inside Facebook. If FriendFeed is so dead why is Twitter trying to choke it.
Correction: FriendFeed is clearly dead. If you have ever worked for a startup and tried to ship a running product you know that focus is the only thing that will keep you alive. Facebook is a massive platform serving a scale of social interaction that has only been previously seen by distributed systems like email. The last thing Facebook wants is for its newly aquiried superstar team to waste time working on a platform that no longer matters to their commercial success or the bulk of their users (i.e. Friendfeed).
Twitter is choking FriendFeed for another reason – because it’s systems are now essentially just a proxy to Facebook. As stated above, Twitter can not give it’s number one competitor priority access to one of its major assets (i.e. timley access to the data).
The data that Microsoft and Google does not exercise hoarding tactics over (the examples Steve gave were IMAP and POP3) are open standards using open protocols.
I am never sure about Steve’s position on open standards, he often vacillates from championing the open cause through projects like the Attention Trust only then to claim things like APML and DataPortability are bullshit – maybe he just doesn’t like me (That can’t be right can it Steve?).
The fact is, however, that open standards and protocols are the basis for open systems which is why companies like Microsoft and Google do not control your email. Twitter and Facebook are not open systems.
So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. That, of course, means Facebook has to go along with it. Playing ball with Twitter command and control doesn’t make sense unless Facebook likes the idea of doing the same thing with “their” own stream. Well, maybe so. That leaves two obvious alternatives.
The first is Google Wave, which offers much of the realtime conversational technology FriendFeed rebooted around, minus a way of deploying this stream publicly. The Wave team seems to be somewhat adrift in the conversion of private Waves to public streams, running into scaling issues with Wave bots that don’t seem to effectively handle a publishing process (if I understood the recent briefing correctly.) But if Waves can gain traction around events and become integrated with Gmail as Paul Buchheit recently predicted, then an enterprising Wave developer might write a bot that captures Tweets as they are entered or received by Twitter and siphons them into the Wave repository in near realtime.
Translation: Twitter is killing FriendFeed because they think no one will notice or care enough to stop them – Twitter has more than enough momentum and support to continue along it’s current path. Facebook wont cry foul because they are doing the same hoarding technique with their own data.
Maybe Google Wave might save the day, but they seem to have lost their way.
Correction: Actually the only people who can call bullshit on Twitter and Facebook is us, the media. We are all media after all. Steve Gillmor in fact is one of the loudest voices – he should call bullshit on closed systems in general. Instead we all seem to be betting on one closed system to do better than another closed system.
We are like abused wives going back for more, each time pretending that our husbands love us. Guess what, they don’t love us. They love their IPO.
I was the first to support Google Wave very loudly and proudly. I met with the team and was among the first to get in and play with the preview. It is a revolution in collaboration and how to launch a new open system. It is not, however, a Twitter or Facebook competitor. Especially not in its current state. It is not even a replacement to email. It is simply the best damned wiki product ever created.
Waves are the 180′ opposite of FriendFeed and Facebook or even Twitter. They are open, flexible and lacking any structure whatsoever. Their current container, the Google Wave client, however, is totally sub-optimal for a messaging metaphor much less a many-to-many passive social platform. It is a document development platform. Nothing more.
The same could be true of Microsoft’s deal for the firehose, but here, as with Google, Twitter may not want to risk flaunting ownership of a stream that can so easily be cloned for its enterprise value. And as easily as you can say RSS is dead, Salesforce Chatter enters the picture. Here’s one player Twitter can’t just laugh off. First of all, it’s not Twitter but Facebook Benioff is cloning, and a future Facebook at that, one where the Everyone status will be built out as a (pardon the expression) public option. This free cross-Web Chatter stream will challenge Facebook’s transitional issues from private to public, given that Salesforce’s cloud can immediately scale up to the allegedly onerous task of providing personalized Track on demand.
Translation: Maybe the enterprise players – specifically Salesforces’ Chatter – will save the day.
Correction: Doubtful. This is just another closed system for a specific vertical. It’s long overdue. It is awesome. But it is not a Facebook or Twitter competitor much less an open alternative to the proprietary messaging systems we keep flocking to. It is simply a long overdue expansion of the simple changelog tracking feature on ERP assets. It’s a simple feature that was sponsored by a simple question. “Why doesn’t the asset changelog include more data – including social data?”. Duh. I was doing this in my own web based CRM at the start of the decade.
It’s likely this pressure can be turned to good use by Facebook, unencumbered as they are by any licensing deal with Twitter. Instead, a Chatter alliance with the Facebook Everyone cloud puts Salesforce in the interesting position of managing a public stream with Google Apps support, which eventually could mean Wave integration. Where this might break first is in media publishing, as Benioff noted at the CrunchUp. Twitter’s leverage over its third party developers could be diluted significantly once Salesforce offers monetization paths for its Force.com developers. So much so that this may call Twitter’s bluff with FriendFeed.
Translation: No idea
But FriendFeed has always been more of a tactical takedown of Twitter than an actual competitor, a stalking horse for just the kind of attack Twitter seems most afraid of. No wonder the speed with which Twitter is introducing metadata traps to lock down the IP before a significant cloud emerges to challenge its inevitability. Lists, retweets, location — they’re all based on raising the rate limiting hammer to discourage heading for the exits. It’s not that retweets reduce the functionality of the trail of overlapping social circles, it’s that they lock them behind the Wall.
Translation: Twitter is introducing more metadata into tweets to maintain its lock in through API limits etc.
Correction: On this point Steve is partially correct. This isn’t about rate limiting though – it’s about turning Twitter’s proprietary protocol into a real-time transport for all the data the web has to offer. It is not about API limits but rather cramming so much value into the pipe that the pipe becomes like water – you gotta drink from it or you’re going to die.
I don’t expect anyone from Twitter to answer the simple question of when will Twitter give FriendFeed the same access they provide other third party client vendors. For now, it’s frustrating to not see the flow of Twitter messages in realtime, but over time we’ll build tools on top of FriendFeed to take such embargoed messages private. Once inside FriendFeed, the realtime conversations that result are just the kind of high value threads Chatter will support, Wave will accelerate, and Silverlight will transport. Keep up the good work, Twitter.
Translation: I doubt Twitter will play nice with FriendFeed and give them equal access again because once items are inside FriendFeed they turn into rich conversations. Conversations that Chatter will support, Wave will accelerate and silverlight will transport.
Correction: Actually Twitter does not and has never given fair and equal access to its data. FriendFeed had a moment in the sun with first class access the likes of which almost no one else has seen before or since.
I have no idea how Chatter fits into the B2C picture – it is clearly an Enterprise play for Salesforce. Wave indeed will act as a great interface through which to participate in real-time threads. The threads themselves, however, will need to be generated or framed by much more rigid systems designed for public discussion.
Silverlight is great for rich web apps. It is Microsoft’s way of bringing the richness of the client into the browser. Just like .NET is to Java, Silverlight is to Flash. A way for Microsoft to leverage a key technology component without handing the crown to someone/something it doesn’t control. But I’m not sure if fits into this discussion.
In the end, the only real solution for all of this, of course, is a return to the way the web has always worked (well). Open systems. The transport should not be Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Wave or any other nonsense. It should be RSS and Atom (ActivityStrea.ms specifically) transported over PubSubHubBub and read by open standards aggregators. The namespaces should be OpenID based and adoptable by all.
The sooner the early adopter community realizes this, the commentators push for this and the developers code for this, the better off we will all be.
Disclosure: I work for JS-Kit, creators of Echo – one of the largest providers of Real-time streams. I also Tweet – trying to find an alternative though!
Read MoreThe blog revolution that I spoke of in my previous post ‘Blogs are Back” feels to me, right now, like the Iranian revolution that almost happened a couple of months back. It is in danger of fading away as we get wrapped up in ‘what will Facebook do next’ mania.
You see, a couple of months ago there seemed to be an awakening that blogs are the first, best social networking platforms. This realization seemed to be driven by many converging factors including…
Instead though, it now seems that many bloggers are holding on desperately to the notion that FriendFeed may survive or that Facebook may get better. They continue to pour their content, conversation and influence into a platform that does not hold their brand, their ads or their control. We all seem desperate to see what next move these closed platforms make.
I have news for you – FriendFeed is dead. The team has moved on to work with the core Facebook team.
At best, FriendFeed will go the way of Del.icio.us and Flickr – stable but not innovating. At worst, it will go the way of Jaiku or even Dodgeball.
It’s time we start re-investing in our own, open social platforms. Blogs. Blogs are our profile pages – social nodes – on the open, distributed social web.
Blogs missing a feature you like from FriendFeed? Build a plugin. There’s nothing Facebook or FriendFeed does that a blog can’t do with enough imagination.
Our job now, as early adopters and social media addicts, should be to build the tools and technologies to educate the mainstream that blogs and blogging can be just as easy, lightweight, social and exciting as Facebook. Even more so.
All that’s need is a change in perspective and slight tweaks around the edges.
Blogs are back.
Who’s with me?
Read MoreWhen Khris and I showed Robert Scoble Echo prior to the Launch at the Real-Time Crunchup he said “Wow, Blogs are Back!”.
I couldn’t agree more. It looks like his sentiment is starting to propagate.
When I say Blogs are Back I mean that the balance between other forms of social media (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed etc) are now finding their rightful balance with the first and foremost social platform, Blogging.
This is not to suggest that other forms of interaction are going away, only that there is a natural equilibrium to be struck.
There are a number of factors that are helping this trend along.
They include:
I also discussed this with Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Marshall Kirkpatrick the other day on the BadHairDay podcast.
You can also see previous references to this in my ‘What is Echo‘ post. I’ve also posted a more detailed account of how Echo fits into this notion on the JS-Kit blog.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have also posted on this. I also registered ‘BlogsAreBack.com’ (what should I do with it?).
I look forward to see what this new trend brings!
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