As much as I agree with the overall premise (Facebook won't be king of the mountain forever), I'm still a bit unsure about what the driving force will be for users to go from Facebook to "open" alternatives.<p>The driving force for leaving AOL was clear: there's a big, exciting internet out there that's more interesting and innovative than AOL chatrooms and AOL keywords, and the user base was also getting a little more comfortable with computers and didn't need AOL to hold it's hand so much any more.<p>I don't see a similar driving force for leaving Facebook. As a matter of fact, Facebook is embracing innovation, pre-emptively embracing whatever things might give users a reason to jump ship.
What if social networking is like instant messaging? After many years, the proprietary instant messaging services have not been replaced with an open alternative. Open does not always win.
I don't like the analogy. AOL wanted to be the gatekeeper to the Internet and charge users a fee for their "premium" content. They were replaced because the internet is infrastructure, and a million other entities created sites and services that were better than what AOL was trying to charge for.<p>Facebook on the other hand, embraces the open web, and sinks it's hooks in via extremely elegant and lightweight hooks like Login with Facebook and FBJS that have impeccable usability and deliver measurable value to site owners. They are not fighting against current trends, rather they are defining and riding them.<p>Facebook will not be in trouble until their business model starts to collide with user interests. Privacy concerns are a potential problem for them, but don't fool yourselves that even a sizable minority of users care about that <i>yet</i>.
this article mostly seems like a lot of applause lights. The author likes 'open' and wants to believe that 'open' will win. It's won once before, and so the author calls it 'inevitable'. That's not supporting an argument. The universe is still allowed to turn around and say 'so what,' and do something different.
There are more people using Facebook than there are people in the US. AOL and its chat rooms were the "AOL days" of social networking. We're in a type of middle. The line from Space Balls comes to mind: "We're at now, now."
I hope we'll end up with something open, but I have my doubts. There are still many closed systems that indicate that it <i>may</i> not happen:<p>* Apple released their closed Mac Store today after 25+ years of a open system, to add to their many closed systems. Apple have shown several times they will block apps. they don't like.<p>* We've had 35+ years of games consoles, on which the games are tightly controlled by the supplier of the console. Microsoft have already indicated they will not allow certain types of games in to use Kinect.<p>* 100+ years after the invention of the Telephone we have Skype, which is controlled by a single company.<p>* Whilst Email is open. Microsoft, Google or Yahoo control so much of the market they can and do effectively stop you talking to your customers by marking your mails as spam and making it hard to appeal (e.g. previous spammer on your IP)
That metaphor just doesn't work.<p>AOL was a walled garden that survived first by convincing people that there was no real Internet outside of it, and then by trying to pretend that the "Internet" was just a part of AOL.<p>Eventually, people caught on that there was in fact this giant Internet out there all by itself, and AOL wasn't technically required to access it. So people left.<p>Facebook, however, is the <i>entire</i> Facebook. There is no giant social entity outside of it that people are being kept away from. It's an end product.<p>So sure, somebody may make a bigger, better one. But they're not going to suddenly remove the blindfold and expose Facebook users to the Truth, because it's just plain not out there.
Open doesn't always win - check out Tim Wu's book the Master Switch. It traces the history of telephone, TV, radio, film (and the Internet, though I haven't gotten there yet). Theodore Vail and AT&T essentially created a massive closed network and David Sarnoff at RCA/NBC did the same with radio & television. They eventually lost their grip on their monopolies, but the government was involved in both. While this isn't a perfect analogy, the imperialist nature of their founders sounds familiar :)<p>One interesting question: If Facebook and Twitter are NBC and CBS, who will be the cable provider for social networking?
Add new entities, add new relations between them. The "social" in the network starts to fade and it simply becomes the network we use to get what we want.<p>Facebook has a nice beachhead, but that does not mean the game is over.
I agree with the sentiment in general, but I don't think the analogy is as solid as the author portrays. Facebook and Twitter, unlike AOL, have not only embraced, but in many ways encouraged other apps and social communities to be built around them, leverage their APIs, and have tried to be a unifying hub of activity, rather than the SOLE destination for their users.