The Herdwatcher has his eye on many flocks. This morning we turn our attention to the pundit-sphere. There are a lot of folks who make their living passing tech news among each other and others. They hold a position somewhere between political commentator and town crier.
Of these, one of the ones I like best is Robert Scoble. Scoble is incredibly well plugged in, a nice guy and very personable. Generally speaking he is a fantastic canary in the web coal mine. If it’s important Scoble will pick up in it very, very quickly. As an interesting side note, Scoble is also the kind of guy who can go out and do incredibly cool things, then talk about them without sounding like an arrogant self centered prick. It’s pretty cool.
So this morning when an urgent Scoblegram came across Twitter I immediately checked out the issue at hand. I mean, how could I help it? The very web was in peril!
“Why Microsoft will buy Facebook AND KEEP IT CLOSED!!! http://tinyurl.com/4g5hka Please link to this, the Web is in peril.” - Robert Scoble
The Friendfeed thread quickly got going, then another and we were off to the races. What was this all about? There is a rumor that Microsoft might buy part of Yahoo and then grab Facebook. To those people who think Microsoft is the work of Satan this is apparently a bad thing. Why?
- First off, Microsoft is just evil man, didn’t you know that?
- If Microsoft buys Facebook, then it won’t support a mostly unimpressive thing called Open Social that promised to lead us all into nirvana
- When we weren’t looking, all of our blogs, web pages, search engines and applications were replaced by cleverly disguised Facebook pages… you only think there is an Internet!
It all centers around a concept called data portability. The idea is that thanks to the growth of service websites we are all accumulating vast amounts of potentially valuable data that reside in places we don’t own or control. For instance if you use Gmail then Google has a huge amount of data about you, including your "social graph" (who you email, how often, who replies and so on). If you store your images in Flickr then someone has your photos. Blogger might have a list who you link to, and so on. Obviously Google is the grand-daddy of them all here and despite "don’t be evil" protestations does not have a stellar record on privacy issues. The core of Google’s business basically revolves around you are letting them strip mine your life for data they can make a profit from in exchange for free services.
The fear is that all this data is locked away and thus in peril. Let’s say that you are one of those folks who has their whole life on Facebook. You keep your images there, you message your friends there, you keep in touch with family via Facebook. Then let’s say someone else comes along and does a better system. Are you able to move? Or are you locked into Facebook because all your data lives there? The answer is of course both.
What confuses me is the seeming assumption that this issue (the tension between the inertia of a current system and the benefits of a migration to a new system) is new to "Web 2.0". It isn’t. This same tension has always existed, and always will. The "Open Social" API won’t change that. Even if I could move all my data from Facebook to the next big thing I would still face the inertia of all my contacts and friends still being on Facebook. The only way to avoid that would be for every social networking service to offer exactly the same feature set, with no value added abilities and an absolutely zero barrier to participation. Now only would that be unlikely, but it would be financially suicidal for the networks in question.
In short, the idea of perfect data portability eliminating friction and inertia in what services we use is simply impossible.
That being obvious then, how is the lack of this utopian future causing such panic and upset? Let’s pretend for a moment that Microsoft buys Facebook and keeps it closed (it is closed now, by the way, and yet the Internet still functions). This is not a given by the way, Microsoft is making a lot of very smart moves around engaging the wider web and they certainly understand the power of network effects. Hell, let’s go a step further and pretend Microsoft buys Facebook and then nukes it.they delete all the data and sink the servers at the bottom of the ocean.
Would the loss of Facebook really mean the literal death of the Web? Of course not.
It’s an interesting time and there are certainly things here to keep an eye on, but really people, get a grip.
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May 19th, 2008 at 8:53 am
While I agree with your overall assessment that this isn’t a big deal - I disagree that Microsoft is evil. They are a company struggling to come to grips with a slowly crumbling platform in the current world of technology - which is hard to deal with when you were the former giant.
So they are clinging on to what they know best - the closed platform.
It’s ironic because so many of the great people at Microsoft are very open - and want to share - but MS also knows that to stay successful in business, you DO want to keep people in your platform (hence the reason why they kill off product development on non-important platforms or EULA you to death).
Google’s the same but they fight it differently because they are open. You know, this should be a post on my side. I’ll go there.
Great post.