7 ms·

Tim Berners-Lee says Facebook is a trap

122 points by greenlblue 16y ago

SeanDav 16y ago
I voted with my feet - I have long since stopped using Facebook for anything other than an occasional game playing platform. Unfortunately I haven't yet found a suitable replacement to use as a social network, but I live in hope...
earnubs 16y ago
Aren't closed silos a big part of the web already, Facebook or no? The W3C is mostly a closed silo, isn't it?
SimonPStevens 16y ago
Here's what I use instead of Facebook: Google calendar for events - Anyone with any email address can be invited to an event. Google calendar also emails out standard format .ics files with it's invites so participants are free to use whatever calendar app they choose and just import the ics files. (This also hooks up nicely with my android calendar). I'm looking forward to when everyone on Facebook gets an @facebook email address and then I'm going to start sending them all Google calendar invites ;-) Seriously, I think Google calendar is a seriously under recognised service. Twitter for a news feed equivalent - You don't need an account to read so it is open enough. (There is also status.net or identi.ca if you want even more openness). I embed a feed of the most recent posts in my webpage. If you want to subscribe, you can use RSS so you don't have to use twitter to follow me. Photos - I use a combination of FlickR and my own custom image gallery on my website. On FlickR you can set the photos to be public so viewers don't need to have an account. Messages - Obviously I just use email. When I meet people I want to connect with, I ask for their email address rather than ask if they are on Facebook. I occasionally use Facebook to find people and then ask for their email address via Fb message. I can't think of anything else I really miss out on from Fb.
- shykes 16y ago
  You're not missing out on the quality of the tools. You're missing out on connectivity. Some people can't be accessed without Facebook. The quantity of those people is growing.
  - DrJokepu 16y ago
    Everyone has an e-mail address (it's a requirement to be able to create a Facebook account) and pretty much everyone is on one of the IM networks.
    - SimonPStevens 16y ago
      > pretty much everyone is on one of the IM networks. I know a lot of people who have ditched their previous IM accounts in favour of the Fb IM platform.
    - arethuza 16y ago
      My teenage son regards email and IM as something old people use. Of course, this was until Facebook added email features and suddenly it's OK to be seen using it.
    - igrekel 16y ago
      Tim doesn't look at just the present state but at the trend. Other posters have noted that many people abandon or don't see the use for IM or email when they use Facebook to communicate. If people stop following their email or logging in to their IM because they communicate using Facebook, it could change quickly.
    - zipdog 16y ago
      FYI: Its possible to get a FB account without a "real" email address. ie Use a one-time address like 10 minute mail. I've had an account for about 2 years with this method, never been a problem
  - SimonPStevens 16y ago
    I do have a Facebook account. I just choose to ensure that my content is published publicly so others who don't have an account can still access it.
- mseebach 16y ago
  > I can't think of anything else I really miss out on from Fb. I can't tell if you've left Facebook and feel these solutions replace it, or if you've just read the list of features, and decided you're covered. What you're missing: The aggregated, passive flow of opportunities to stay in touch. I occasionally have short conversations with people I haven't seen for a decade, prompted by something either I or they posted. It's nothing deep and profound, but it feels good to stay in touch. If I just put pictures and news on my blog or flickr, I would be relying on hundreds of acquaintances from the past 15 year to regularly visit these places - and why would they do that?
  - SimonPStevens 16y ago
    > I can't tell if you've left Facebook and feel these solutions replace it, or if you've just read the list of features, and decided you're covered. I've got an Fb account, and I do use it lightly. I tend to have random conversations with people because of posts they make on twitter, or on their blogs. I do watch my Fb news feed on my phone, so if I spot something worth starting up a conversation about I have the opportunity to. My discomfort with Fb is that to even view content requires an account. Content is only shared amongst account holders. If I post some photos, or an event I don't want to require people to sign up to Fb to view that content. Hence I post my content on more open services. My concern is more for the other people who don't use Fb than it is for myself or those who already use Fb. If I post content on a blog, I sometimes post a link on Fb. I don't see any problem with that. Some people choose to follow me via Fb, and that is fine, but I also want to remain open to those people who don't like Fb and I give them the option to follow me in other ways.
    - mseebach 16y ago
      That's fine (and not terribly different from how I use Facebook and other stuff, actually). But then your question becomes "What do I really miss out on for not using Facebook exclusively?" to which the answer is "Absolutely nothing. kthxbye."
  - nhangen 16y ago
    But who really needs "aggregated, passive flow of opportunities to stay in touch?" These are proxy relationships. Friends are welcome to call me, but I don't want to be involved in their lives 24/7, nor do I want the opportunity.
- treblig 16y ago
  Let me know when your friend invites you to a party on Facebook and you get it via Google Calendar. I'll be the guy by the bar while you're at home. Your friends couldn't care less what an .ics is. My mom doesn't care about "openness". She cares what I put on my Facebook wall. Photo alternative: cute. I'll never go to your Flickr page. I've seen ~100 pictures today of Thanksgiving celebrations, because they were in my News Feed. Messages: Most of my FB messagers are spam, but what do you think is the easiest way to message a 14-year-old?
  - gloob 16y ago
    Maybe my social circle is just old fashioned, but my friends and family actually care whether I come to their events. That means that they have means other than Facebook to contact me with, since I'm not on the site. Maybe your mom would just stop communicating with you if you weren't on Facebook, though; I don't pretend to know what your situation is like.
- vl 16y ago
  Google calendar for events - there is a lock-in and user training problem though. Some people I invited to a party couple years ago couldn't figure out how to accept my Google calendar invite (by clicking link in the email), same people not only manage to accept FB invites, but even capable of creating event of their own. I use FB for invites since this accident.
arethuza 16y ago
So if Facebook is so bad, someone please come up with a compelling high level vision of what could replace it and why the replacement would be better? Preferably something as compelling as Sir Tim's original vision for the Web...
- EliRivers 16y ago
  I've got an idea. How about if you want a presence on the web, you have this website that you control with whatever data and pictures you want on it? Coders can develop things we'll call content management systems to make it a bit easier for you to put your data on there if you don't want to do it all yourself, and since you'll control it, you can add whatever tools and automation and widgets and the like.
  - swombat 16y ago
    I'll one up you on this. Maybe one particular group of coders can build a giant CMS that also has social networking features and allows everyone to have their page on the web, and keep up with what their friends are doing, without having to own, set up and administer their own servers (a prowess which most are incapable of). The hardest thing would be getting critical mass, but if someone could do it, wow, that would be awesome, right?
    - arethuza 16y ago
      That sounds so interesting that you could probably make a movie out of it.
    - jamesbritt 16y ago
      Sweet. We can call it Everyone On-line, or EOL. We'll start first in the States, and call it AOL.
    - bad_user 16y ago
      http://wordpress.com/ http://wordpress.com/ Really, what's the matter with blogs and feed readers for keeping in touch? You know what would be great? A blogging platform that's light (picture / link attachment painless) and that also has a feed reader built in. Oh wait ... http://www.tumblr.com/ http://www.tumblr.com/
dododo 16y ago
w3c should create open standards for social networks. i don't think these companies are going to do it, and this seems exactly what w3c is meant to do. so why not? seems more productive.
- arethuza 16y ago
  I don't exactly rejoice at the idea of reading another W3C standard document.
- pyre 16y ago
  Why not? Because I would rather not have yet another xml-based standard.
- rapind 16y ago
  Well there's FOAF (RDF Ontology for Social Networking). You may want to use a proprietary backend to manage your data as a social networking provider, but the w3c schema already exists to share your graph. Here's Tim's foaf data as an example: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card
alecco 16y ago
The other day we went to an arts event/party. Most of the pictures are trapped inside Facebook. The artists couldn't comprehend why I didn't have "face" at all. This same crowd would've uploaded the pictures to Flickr only a couple of years ago. Staying out of Facebook isn't enough.
- Tichy 16y ago
  I loved the blog article the other day about the guy who had to create a Facebook account for his granny to see his pictures, then delete it again after a while. I think the same person mentioned going through their privacy settings in Facebook once per day. What pain point is FB solving that people willingly go through so much pain? Are there no other photo sharing services out there?
coliveira 16y ago
I don't know how FB can be a threat to the web if it can only exist because of the web. In a sense, friend data is just another kind of data. The same thing can be said, for example, of Gmail or hotmail. They host the email and contact information for millions of people.
- netcan 16y ago
  Good point. It's not hard to imagine social media to have evolved out of web based email clients. If instead of facebook we had all Facebook's features gradually added to Gmail (If you sent a Googler back 5-6 years in a time machine, that might be what we'd get), I don't think it would seem odd that it should be an island.
- tl 16y ago
  That's like saying cancer can't be a threat to people because it can only exist because of people.
- Tichy 16y ago
  There are already native Facebook apps for iPads and phones. So FB can exist without the web. Some people predict a Facebook phone in the future.
brown9-2 16y ago
Previous discussion from 2 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929796 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929796
dominiek 16y ago
I think that Berners-Lee and W3C get way too much credit for the web. And this is an incredibly arrogant statement by Mr. Berners-Lee. Facebook has in-fact done some serious web innovation the last years and W3C has completely dropped the ball. Facebook and Twitter have been catalyzing internet adoption and the general spread of information. Mr. Berners-Lee's obsession about content-silos shows that there is a serious disconnect between the current state of the web and W3C. The web was about content and documents fifteen years ago, now it's about the flow of data. I know Berners-Lee is a big Linked Data advocate, but the approach that's being taken by the W3C is painfully slow and doesn't take into account the fluidity of information. This is one of the reasons why developers (and even semantic web developers) have resorted to non-W3C technologies more and more: JSON, Javascript-wrappers, Webkit, client-side routing, non-REST HTTP requests, IOSockets/Coment, streaming apis, etc. The web is emergent and out of control. Deal with it. Technologies and tools compete for attention and adoption. You snooze, you lose. As for the 'content silos': Are you fucking kidding me? 'Content' being stuck in Facebook is not going to happen, in fact, the content is going to flow more and more. If you mark something as 'only my friends can see this', it will leak. Don't want to be tagged in a picture? Well, you have no choice. Face recognition will get you soon. The internet, thanks to social web, is a giant copy machine. There's a huge shitstream of content and your attention and the activity around it is the thing that matters. Who cares about the damn content. So maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the W3 Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something, instead of bitch about the companies that actually advance the web. So instead of bitching about the companies and people that actually advance the web and change the world, maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something...
- Tichy 16y ago
  Facebook dominating the web is a horror scenario.What good could you see about it? Do you want to pay a Facebook tax for every online innovation you can come up with? Do you want to be at their mercy for the survival of your business? My only hope is that in the long run freedom of innovation will always be stronger than a walled garden like Facebook. I thought Berners-Lee invented the web - how can he get too much credit for that? Hypertext as an idea existed before that, I think, but he did it.
pointillistic 16y ago
I agree with the sentiment completely but doesn't Tim-Berners-Lee work for Google, the main competitor?
- netcan 16y ago
  I don't think so (wikipedia doesn't mention it). Maybe you're thinking of Vint Cerf? He works at google. Serf - TCP/IP Berners-Lee - World Wide Web, HTML, HTTP (I think)
  - pointillistic 16y ago
    Yes, you are correct, I was thinking of Vint Cerf.
oldpond 16y ago
I think he's right in some ways. I for one don't want my internet to be branded. I'd like to know how it came about that everywhere you look you only see a few brands on the internet now. Facebook, Twitter, Google, eBay. Are we saying there's only one social networking site, only one whatever-Twitter-is site, only one search engine, only one place to sell your garage sale junk? How did that happen? Companies like Disney control the movie industry by controlling the channel. You can make movies all you want, but try to get them into the theatres and rental stores. It's the same for the music industry. You can cut cd's all you want but try to get them on the radio or in the music stores. You can make a website and it can be the best website in the world, but if it doesn't appear in a search engine, it doesn't exist. With all these big, rich companies doing business on the internet, do you think for a minute they are going to allow it to remain free?
paulnelligan 16y ago
I always have a feeling that facebook is limiting entrepreneurs. You can't launch a social product today without making it facebook compliant and this means abiding by facebook's rules, and working within their structural limitations. These limitations they've imposed ensure that they keep their market share and prevent anyone else from really growing in the same space as them. But I don't think they can stay at the top forever. Demand for an open alternative is too high, and I'm really hoping (along with many others) that Diaspora can make some headway with this.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  I know a guy who recently tried to build a social application, starting outside of Facebook. It was actually a very good idea and well implemented; unfortunately, the complete lack of connectivity to groups of people sealed its fate. By the time he got to integrating into Facebook Connect, he was almost out of money. I think entrepreneurs wanting to build a social product are in better shape today because of Facebook and its built-in social network. But you are, of course, correct that building on somebody else's platform is always dangerous. Lastly, "Open" is not really a feature to end-users. Diaspora will win if they can build compelling features that Facebook, as a result of its closed network, can't. Otherwise, I doubt highly it will be successful.
  - paulnelligan 16y ago
    I agree ... but openness and transparency alone may be a good enough draw for many people, so long as diaspora can compete with facebook feature-wise.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
giantsquid 16y ago
As does Admiral Ackbar!
T_S_ 16y ago
In a world where people take out payday loans at 400% is it any a surprise that they would incur technical debt in managing their content? The typical user thinks about the interaction with other users, not the content.
brianobush 16y ago
Is there much value in the content on FB to those outside the social circle it is intended for? Most of my friends on FB post interesting blurbs, but it is time-specific and usually requires some insider information to be useful/interpreted.
- zipdog 16y ago
  One huge value: Targeted advertising. The FB scripts can tell your sexual orientation from your post content. I imagine they know a lot more than that too.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
squidsoup 16y ago
I have successfully solved the Facebook dilemma by not having any friends.
melipone 16y ago
Facebook is the AOL of today. It just make it easy for non-computer literate people to communicate without learning how to send and receive email.
contextfree 16y ago
I think this headline puts a somewhat sensational slant on what TimBL actually wrote.
khookie 16y ago
Nothing to worry about - people will realise in a few years or so that status updates are only feeding their stupid egos and they'll find themselves many other things to distract themselves with soon enough.
known 16y ago
Was TBL refused a job in FB?

122 points by greenlblue 16y ago

I voted with my feet - I have long since stopped using Facebook for anything other than an occasional game playing platform. Unfortunately I haven't yet found a suitable replacement to use as a social network, but I live in hope...

earnubs 16y ago

Aren't closed silos a big part of the web already, Facebook or no? The W3C is mostly a closed silo, isn't it?

SimonPStevens 16y ago

Here's what I use instead of Facebook: Google calendar for events - Anyone with any email address can be invited to an event. Google calendar also emails out standard format .ics files with it's invites so participants are free to use whatever calendar app they choose and just import the ics files. (This also hooks up nicely with my android calendar). I'm looking forward to when everyone on Facebook gets an @facebook email address and then I'm going to start sending them all Google calendar invites ;-) Seriously, I think Google calendar is a seriously under recognised service. Twitter for a news feed equivalent - You don't need an account to read so it is open enough. (There is also status.net or identi.ca if you want even more openness). I embed a feed of the most recent posts in my webpage. If you want to subscribe, you can use RSS so you don't have to use twitter to follow me. Photos - I use a combination of FlickR and my own custom image gallery on my website. On FlickR you can set the photos to be public so viewers don't need to have an account. Messages - Obviously I just use email. When I meet people I want to connect with, I ask for their email address rather than ask if they are on Facebook. I occasionally use Facebook to find people and then ask for their email address via Fb message. I can't think of anything else I really miss out on from Fb.

shykes 16y ago
You're not missing out on the quality of the tools. You're missing out on connectivity. Some people can't be accessed without Facebook. The quantity of those people is growing.
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  Everyone has an e-mail address (it's a requirement to be able to create a Facebook account) and pretty much everyone is on one of the IM networks.
  - SimonPStevens 16y ago
    > pretty much everyone is on one of the IM networks. I know a lot of people who have ditched their previous IM accounts in favour of the Fb IM platform.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    My teenage son regards email and IM as something old people use. Of course, this was until Facebook added email features and suddenly it's OK to be seen using it.
  - igrekel 16y ago
    Tim doesn't look at just the present state but at the trend. Other posters have noted that many people abandon or don't see the use for IM or email when they use Facebook to communicate. If people stop following their email or logging in to their IM because they communicate using Facebook, it could change quickly.
  - zipdog 16y ago
    FYI: Its possible to get a FB account without a "real" email address. ie Use a one-time address like 10 minute mail. I've had an account for about 2 years with this method, never been a problem
- SimonPStevens 16y ago
  I do have a Facebook account. I just choose to ensure that my content is published publicly so others who don't have an account can still access it.
mseebach 16y ago
> I can't think of anything else I really miss out on from Fb. I can't tell if you've left Facebook and feel these solutions replace it, or if you've just read the list of features, and decided you're covered. What you're missing: The aggregated, passive flow of opportunities to stay in touch. I occasionally have short conversations with people I haven't seen for a decade, prompted by something either I or they posted. It's nothing deep and profound, but it feels good to stay in touch. If I just put pictures and news on my blog or flickr, I would be relying on hundreds of acquaintances from the past 15 year to regularly visit these places - and why would they do that?
- SimonPStevens 16y ago
  > I can't tell if you've left Facebook and feel these solutions replace it, or if you've just read the list of features, and decided you're covered. I've got an Fb account, and I do use it lightly. I tend to have random conversations with people because of posts they make on twitter, or on their blogs. I do watch my Fb news feed on my phone, so if I spot something worth starting up a conversation about I have the opportunity to. My discomfort with Fb is that to even view content requires an account. Content is only shared amongst account holders. If I post some photos, or an event I don't want to require people to sign up to Fb to view that content. Hence I post my content on more open services. My concern is more for the other people who don't use Fb than it is for myself or those who already use Fb. If I post content on a blog, I sometimes post a link on Fb. I don't see any problem with that. Some people choose to follow me via Fb, and that is fine, but I also want to remain open to those people who don't like Fb and I give them the option to follow me in other ways.
  - mseebach 16y ago
    That's fine (and not terribly different from how I use Facebook and other stuff, actually). But then your question becomes "What do I really miss out on for not using Facebook exclusively?" to which the answer is "Absolutely nothing. kthxbye."
- nhangen 16y ago
  But who really needs "aggregated, passive flow of opportunities to stay in touch?" These are proxy relationships. Friends are welcome to call me, but I don't want to be involved in their lives 24/7, nor do I want the opportunity.
treblig 16y ago
Let me know when your friend invites you to a party on Facebook and you get it via Google Calendar. I'll be the guy by the bar while you're at home. Your friends couldn't care less what an .ics is. My mom doesn't care about "openness". She cares what I put on my Facebook wall. Photo alternative: cute. I'll never go to your Flickr page. I've seen ~100 pictures today of Thanksgiving celebrations, because they were in my News Feed. Messages: Most of my FB messagers are spam, but what do you think is the easiest way to message a 14-year-old?
- gloob 16y ago
  Maybe my social circle is just old fashioned, but my friends and family actually care whether I come to their events. That means that they have means other than Facebook to contact me with, since I'm not on the site. Maybe your mom would just stop communicating with you if you weren't on Facebook, though; I don't pretend to know what your situation is like.
vl 16y ago
Google calendar for events - there is a lock-in and user training problem though. Some people I invited to a party couple years ago couldn't figure out how to accept my Google calendar invite (by clicking link in the email), same people not only manage to accept FB invites, but even capable of creating event of their own. I use FB for invites since this accident.

arethuza 16y ago

So if Facebook is so bad, someone please come up with a compelling high level vision of what could replace it and why the replacement would be better? Preferably something as compelling as Sir Tim's original vision for the Web...

EliRivers 16y ago
I've got an idea. How about if you want a presence on the web, you have this website that you control with whatever data and pictures you want on it? Coders can develop things we'll call content management systems to make it a bit easier for you to put your data on there if you don't want to do it all yourself, and since you'll control it, you can add whatever tools and automation and widgets and the like.
- swombat 16y ago
  I'll one up you on this. Maybe one particular group of coders can build a giant CMS that also has social networking features and allows everyone to have their page on the web, and keep up with what their friends are doing, without having to own, set up and administer their own servers (a prowess which most are incapable of). The hardest thing would be getting critical mass, but if someone could do it, wow, that would be awesome, right?
  - arethuza 16y ago
    That sounds so interesting that you could probably make a movie out of it.
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    Sweet. We can call it Everyone On-line, or EOL. We'll start first in the States, and call it AOL.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    http://wordpress.com/ http://wordpress.com/ Really, what's the matter with blogs and feed readers for keeping in touch? You know what would be great? A blogging platform that's light (picture / link attachment painless) and that also has a feed reader built in. Oh wait ... http://www.tumblr.com/ http://www.tumblr.com/

dododo 16y ago

w3c should create open standards for social networks. i don't think these companies are going to do it, and this seems exactly what w3c is meant to do. so why not? seems more productive.

arethuza 16y ago
I don't exactly rejoice at the idea of reading another W3C standard document.
pyre 16y ago
Why not? Because I would rather not have yet another xml-based standard.
rapind 16y ago
Well there's FOAF (RDF Ontology for Social Networking). You may want to use a proprietary backend to manage your data as a social networking provider, but the w3c schema already exists to share your graph. Here's Tim's foaf data as an example: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card

alecco 16y ago

The other day we went to an arts event/party. Most of the pictures are trapped inside Facebook. The artists couldn't comprehend why I didn't have "face" at all. This same crowd would've uploaded the pictures to Flickr only a couple of years ago. Staying out of Facebook isn't enough.

Tichy 16y ago
I loved the blog article the other day about the guy who had to create a Facebook account for his granny to see his pictures, then delete it again after a while. I think the same person mentioned going through their privacy settings in Facebook once per day. What pain point is FB solving that people willingly go through so much pain? Are there no other photo sharing services out there?

coliveira 16y ago

I don't know how FB can be a threat to the web if it can only exist because of the web. In a sense, friend data is just another kind of data. The same thing can be said, for example, of Gmail or hotmail. They host the email and contact information for millions of people.

netcan 16y ago
Good point. It's not hard to imagine social media to have evolved out of web based email clients. If instead of facebook we had all Facebook's features gradually added to Gmail (If you sent a Googler back 5-6 years in a time machine, that might be what we'd get), I don't think it would seem odd that it should be an island.
tl 16y ago
That's like saying cancer can't be a threat to people because it can only exist because of people.
Tichy 16y ago
There are already native Facebook apps for iPads and phones. So FB can exist without the web. Some people predict a Facebook phone in the future.

brown9-2 16y ago

Previous discussion from 2 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929796 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929796

dominiek 16y ago

I think that Berners-Lee and W3C get way too much credit for the web. And this is an incredibly arrogant statement by Mr. Berners-Lee. Facebook has in-fact done some serious web innovation the last years and W3C has completely dropped the ball. Facebook and Twitter have been catalyzing internet adoption and the general spread of information. Mr. Berners-Lee's obsession about content-silos shows that there is a serious disconnect between the current state of the web and W3C. The web was about content and documents fifteen years ago, now it's about the flow of data. I know Berners-Lee is a big Linked Data advocate, but the approach that's being taken by the W3C is painfully slow and doesn't take into account the fluidity of information. This is one of the reasons why developers (and even semantic web developers) have resorted to non-W3C technologies more and more: JSON, Javascript-wrappers, Webkit, client-side routing, non-REST HTTP requests, IOSockets/Coment, streaming apis, etc. The web is emergent and out of control. Deal with it. Technologies and tools compete for attention and adoption. You snooze, you lose. As for the 'content silos': Are you fucking kidding me? 'Content' being stuck in Facebook is not going to happen, in fact, the content is going to flow more and more. If you mark something as 'only my friends can see this', it will leak. Don't want to be tagged in a picture? Well, you have no choice. Face recognition will get you soon. The internet, thanks to social web, is a giant copy machine. There's a huge shitstream of content and your attention and the activity around it is the thing that matters. Who cares about the damn content. So maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the W3 Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something, instead of bitch about the companies that actually advance the web. So instead of bitching about the companies and people that actually advance the web and change the world, maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something...

Tichy 16y ago
Facebook dominating the web is a horror scenario.What good could you see about it? Do you want to pay a Facebook tax for every online innovation you can come up with? Do you want to be at their mercy for the survival of your business? My only hope is that in the long run freedom of innovation will always be stronger than a walled garden like Facebook. I thought Berners-Lee invented the web - how can he get too much credit for that? Hypertext as an idea existed before that, I think, but he did it.

pointillistic 16y ago

I agree with the sentiment completely but doesn't Tim-Berners-Lee work for Google, the main competitor?

netcan 16y ago
I don't think so (wikipedia doesn't mention it). Maybe you're thinking of Vint Cerf? He works at google. Serf - TCP/IP Berners-Lee - World Wide Web, HTML, HTTP (I think)
- pointillistic 16y ago
  Yes, you are correct, I was thinking of Vint Cerf.

oldpond 16y ago

I think he's right in some ways. I for one don't want my internet to be branded. I'd like to know how it came about that everywhere you look you only see a few brands on the internet now. Facebook, Twitter, Google, eBay. Are we saying there's only one social networking site, only one whatever-Twitter-is site, only one search engine, only one place to sell your garage sale junk? How did that happen? Companies like Disney control the movie industry by controlling the channel. You can make movies all you want, but try to get them into the theatres and rental stores. It's the same for the music industry. You can cut cd's all you want but try to get them on the radio or in the music stores. You can make a website and it can be the best website in the world, but if it doesn't appear in a search engine, it doesn't exist. With all these big, rich companies doing business on the internet, do you think for a minute they are going to allow it to remain free?

paulnelligan 16y ago

I always have a feeling that facebook is limiting entrepreneurs. You can't launch a social product today without making it facebook compliant and this means abiding by facebook's rules, and working within their structural limitations. These limitations they've imposed ensure that they keep their market share and prevent anyone else from really growing in the same space as them. But I don't think they can stay at the top forever. Demand for an open alternative is too high, and I'm really hoping (along with many others) that Diaspora can make some headway with this.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
I know a guy who recently tried to build a social application, starting outside of Facebook. It was actually a very good idea and well implemented; unfortunately, the complete lack of connectivity to groups of people sealed its fate. By the time he got to integrating into Facebook Connect, he was almost out of money. I think entrepreneurs wanting to build a social product are in better shape today because of Facebook and its built-in social network. But you are, of course, correct that building on somebody else's platform is always dangerous. Lastly, "Open" is not really a feature to end-users. Diaspora will win if they can build compelling features that Facebook, as a result of its closed network, can't. Otherwise, I doubt highly it will be successful.
- paulnelligan 16y ago
  I agree ... but openness and transparency alone may be a good enough draw for many people, so long as diaspora can compete with facebook feature-wise.

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giantsquid 16y ago

As does Admiral Ackbar!

T_S_ 16y ago

In a world where people take out payday loans at 400% is it any a surprise that they would incur technical debt in managing their content? The typical user thinks about the interaction with other users, not the content.

brianobush 16y ago

Is there much value in the content on FB to those outside the social circle it is intended for? Most of my friends on FB post interesting blurbs, but it is time-specific and usually requires some insider information to be useful/interpreted.

zipdog 16y ago
One huge value: Targeted advertising. The FB scripts can tell your sexual orientation from your post content. I imagine they know a lot more than that too.

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squidsoup 16y ago

I have successfully solved the Facebook dilemma by not having any friends.

melipone 16y ago

Facebook is the AOL of today. It just make it easy for non-computer literate people to communicate without learning how to send and receive email.

contextfree 16y ago

I think this headline puts a somewhat sensational slant on what TimBL actually wrote.

khookie 16y ago

Nothing to worry about - people will realise in a few years or so that status updates are only feeding their stupid egos and they'll find themselves many other things to distract themselves with soon enough.

known 16y ago

Was TBL refused a job in FB?