All your widgets are belong to Facebook

Categories: Facebook Strategy, Security, Social Networking, Web Theory, Widget StrategyPosted on July 18th, 2007

Facebook = Blackhole, Whirlpool, Vortex.

Facebook is a closed garden with one way doors. Data in, but no data out. With so many companies, startups, ecommerce companies building widgets for this platform did anyone stop to consider that they’re not letting data flow out? Matt Dickman agrees, watch his video. Here’s what we should be concerned about:

1) For example, my non-Facebook friends can’t see what I’m doing, and I’m a public guy. If I link to Facebook, you have to register and sign up, brilliant web acquisition for Facebook.

2) But after I’ve setup my profile, and I would like it to be an open platform, I should have the ability to make my profile public and let folks see the elements I want.

3) What about my network? data? Profile? I want to export those. (Same thing to LinkedIn). The rolodex of today has an important field “friends”. I want to be able to export my network other systems and applications. What say you Marc Canter? Here’s a softball.

4) Last gripe? As far as I know Facebook doesn’t even have RSS

Opportunity for Facebook
Facebook (and whichever network follows suit) has a huge opportunity to not just be an application platform, but to be a true identity system for the entire network. This is why I think that Facebook could kill Open ID. So before we start jumping up and down, giving Facebook all of our data, and building our company widgets in Facebook should we first think about if this is a black hole?

Related reads

Facebook Predictions

LinkedIn’s Web Strategy, irrelevant?

Update: Jason Fields send me this link to ProfileLinker, it says it offers a portable social network address book.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under Facebook Strategy, Security, Social Networking, Web Theory, Widget Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

kory

facebook is growing fast, in general the future of communication is in control of the social mobile networks. Their growing past each one attaacts a different audience, peekamo hit their audience on a more persoanl level through text, facebook is hitting everyone through pics, groups. Networking is now a business itself.

Shannon

Interesting piece. I don't worry too much about the issues you raised - maybe I should. I just think that Facebook provides a nice service and thats why I use it. I have my blog so the general public can always view that.

Krish

Jeremiah,

Here is my take on this issue. I wrote this post one month back and got some favorable response

A decentralized social networking platform

Jeremiah Owyang

Shannon

It may not seem like a big deal now, chances are, you're not fully invested with all the time you've done to build your network.

Chris Rossini

This is actually a tough issue because I believe one of the most appealing things about Facebook is that it's closed off.

Communication is done with the understanding that the entire world is not going to see it.

Furthermore, profiles contain personal information. Many people are not willing to share this with the entire world.

Lisa

I agree and disagree with this post.

There's no RSS feed for Facebook. I think it sucks. You can't view profiles unless you have an account. There's a lot of things you can't see if you are not logged in on Facebook. But as one of your readers pointed out, some people prefer it that way.

But Facebook apps allow you to distribute content from within Facebook. Now I don't have to go to Twitter anymore to update my status. I can also update Jaiku from Twitter. And now I can even publish my Wordpress blog posts from Facebook. I see Facebook as a control panel for all my social networking applications. Sure I still have to update each app individually but it saves me from having to go to several other sites, each with a separate login. In that sense I guess I can also say that Facebook is like my single sign on social networking solution. (I posted about this a while back, but maybe it was over-reaching when I said Facebook apps make it a little easier to be ubiquitous in social networks: http://lisaamorao.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/face...).

Neil Ford

As you know, I've made my feelings known about Facebook previously - http://blog.neilcford.com

I've recently reactivated my account but only so I can keep up with what's going on inside the walls.

- Neil.

Jeremiah Owyang

Lisa

What if we could have the OPTION of making our Facebook profile public?

christopher salazar

I think a really big opportunity for facebook is to create a MySpace widget. As odd as it sounds, it wont hurt facebook. It would be cool if I could log into facebook and see if I have any comments on my myspace! Although, it may not benefit MySpace all that much, unless they do something similar. Why should they fight together, instead Facebook should leverage the MySpace population for their benefit!

Jeremiah Owyang

Tantek twittered me and said that microformats could also be a solution

Chris Brogan...

So you're at least in their neighborhood, Jeremiah. Any friends over there you can ping and get some answer to the crowd of angry nerds brandishing iPhones at the base of the Facebook castle?

--Chris...

Peter C

Part of being a friendly web site these days is being transparent and not locking users into your service. Being able to export your data is one good way of moving towards that. It would be great to see Facebook do that instead of maintaining such exclusivity.

Alex Moskalyuk

The public profile is here, and that's what any logged out user will see
http://www.facebook.com/p/Jeremiah_Owyang/50329...
The badge is configurable here
http://www.facebook.com/badges.php
and can be added to pretty much any site out there

Mark Collier

They do have feeds: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/faq.php

However, it appears that each feed is tailored to the individual friend (inside of FB) that wants to monitor your activity. An interesting approach.

dave mcclure

good food for thought jeremiah, altho i still think a plentiful walled garden with great app infrastructure might be a more interesting place to hang out than a very wide open potato field with just a few scraggly potatoes ;)

my take on Facebook = Microsoft Visual Basic is here:
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/07/kot...

- dmc

Marco Hansell

I almost investigated the Facebook feed page and then I saw how long it was and decided it wasn't worth it. On Facebook's end though it's pretty smart. Why integrate with the competition if they can make the competition integrate with them?