an open (face)book?
There has been an interesting conversation brewing at WIRED and Mashable this month on the shape of social networking to come. A WIRED article by Scott Gilbertson entitled Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up called out Facebook for “locking down” their product as if it were a cell phone or DRM audio. An accompanying wiki illustrates how numerous open social tools can be utilized to almost recreate the full range of functionality of facebook:
Start by setting up a blog. Say what’s on your mind. Unlike your blog on Facebook or MySpace, everyone will be able to read it. From there, you can pull in your photos from Flickr or Zooomr and show off your impeccable musical taste by creating a profile at iLike or Last.fm. You can share your web bookmarks using del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia and publish a list of your most recent reads using Shelfari or LibraryThing.
All of these services have open APIs, making it easy for third-party developers to build widgets for displaying data stored there. As a result, many such tools exist.
However, what was missing from this social media assemblage was a file format for tracking the relationships between the linker and linked be it familial, personal or professional. This ability to create timelines, deilineate networks and qualify connections is why social media has been so wildly successful.
Pete Cashmore recently posted some commentary on the WIRED piece at Mashable on the need for a .OFF (Open Friends Format) that can be shared between the various social networks any given person is on. The idea behind this format would be to facilitate sharing relationship information across multiple platforms so users would not have to repeatedly build up their social portfolio on every site. Considering how many social media services people are beginning to engage, hopefully the market will move this direction or at least there will be a surge in social network aggregators.
Rather than treat their product like a gated community, perhaps the brass at Facebook should look to services like Jaiku for direction. I’m not talking about microblogging, just the manner in which the network is comprised of modular inputs (RSS feeds) from whatever social media services any given user is active on. Perhaps Facebook could transmutate into that Open Friend Format called for in the Mashable article? Facebook has certainly done an amazing job at managing relationships thus far, maybe this is the attitude they could adopt rather than assuming a protectionist stance. A recent positive sign was Facebook’s addition of RSS feeds tracking user status. These became available about a week ago and are a baby step in the right direction.
Having passed on Friendster and Myspace, my skepticism for Facebook was swept aside quite quickly when I jumped onboard this spring. I find the service quite useful for efficiently managing scores of relationships and poking my nose into adjacent communities. That said, I can’t see the service holding my attention indefinitely if it doesn’t evolve quickly. If nothing else, I’d like to be able to pull (many more) feeds out of Facebook to use elsewhere.
Outside of the open/locked down discussion about Facebook, Persuasive Games don Ian Bogost just posted an in-depth critique of the service. It is worth taking a look at as he digs rather deeply (Greek philosophy deep) into the implications of relationship management in Facebook.
