I’ve written a lot of positive stuffe lately about Facebook. This morning I noticed two different blogs suggesting that despite its growth, Facebook still has it’s challenges.
From Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion blog:
For all of the excitement around Facebook and its application platform, it’s essentially a giant walled garden. You can embed virtually anything you want inside Facebook. Just like open APIs, Facebook’s developer program lets anyone create value in the ecosystem.
The problem, however, lies in this fact - Facebook gives nothing back to the broader web. A lot of stuff goes in, but nothing comes out. What happens in Facebook, stays in Facebook. As Robert Scoble noted, it’s almost completely invisible to Google. You can share only a limited amount of data on your public page - as he has here. That’s fine for many users, but not all.
To thrive, all social networks need to enable the community to create value. Facebook gets a big check mark there. However, they also need to give back to the web. Usually this isn’t an issue. When you give back to the web, you get a return in Google Juice. So it’s unclear why Facebook to date remains a walled garden.
Can walled gardens continue thrive in an era of openness? Can a social network be social even though so little of the community’s value is visible to the outside world? Facebook is writing this book as we speak.
And here’s this from Financial Times (Got the tip from PaidContent)
The aim was to attract more online companies to create services for MySpace’s users. “We’ll be bringing in more developers, says Chris DeWolfe, one of Myspace’s founders.
The race to lure other internet companies to build services on top of their networks reflects an attempt by the social networks to consolidate their recent audience gains and become central parts of the online landscape.
Many internet companies, from Google to Ebay, have started making parts of their platforms available to outside developers, although Facebook’s gambit marks a more radical attempt to turn itself into an “open” service.
For all the hype around Facebook lately, MySpace still claiming a vastly larger audience than Facebook, and Myspace is reporting solid financial returns.
Perhaps this is not a question of either, or. Maybe both mega nets will thrive for the long term. Hard to say, but for those of us just getting into the game it’s tought to ignore these behemoths. They’re paving the way, and I for one am thankful for all they ways they are different from eachother. Their differences give us new ideas…and challenge us to create new things that neither has done before.
I think there’s something to be said for an online community being its own entity, away from Google’s spiders. Maybe I have it backwards, but it’s nice to know there’s a place online for me to share information with friends and not worry that anyone and everyone can read it.
Good point. Different strokes for different folks.
[...] Balancing the book on Facebook - Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle I’ve written a lot of positive stuffe lately about Facebook. This morning I noticed two different blogs suggesting that despite its growth, Facebook still has it’s challenges. (tags: facebook socialnetworking google) [...]
Liked this little blog post on Facebook,
Facebook is the new AOL
I also enjoy working with facebook, but I agree that there are some problems with it. Hopefully they will take down their “wall”