The Death of Facebook: an AOL story.
So it’s happened. Google released OpenSocial and the social graph becomes open. In a nutshell, OpenSocial is Google Gadgets with social networking functionality. Now, developers can create social gadgets using an open framework that will (hopefully) be adopted by every social network on the ‘net. Good for users? Yep, Scrabulous for every site, talking between sites could mean that you can play a scrabulous game on MySpace against your friend on Orkut. Good for developers? Yep, Scrabulous just expanded to MySpace and every other social networking site. Good for social networks? Yep, because what’s good for users and developers is good for the networks, fostering competition on the really important aspects instead of accidental monopolies of social cliques. If this plays out like a fairy tale, with everyone living happily ever after, I will no longer hate Facebook for being yet another data silo that won’t give me back my information.
Or will I? Here’s where the shit hits the fan for Facebook. The initial list of social networking sites that are adopting OpenSocial is huge, and with MySpace and Orkut captures the majority of the market:
MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING
This now positions Facebook squarely in the position that AOL occupied in the late 1990’s: as a walled garden surrounded by open fields. AOL built up a rich user community that it served comparatively well during its heyday when there was nothing better available. But when the internet matured and began serving every niche interest extremely well, the open community rocketed past AOL and put AOL firmly in its place as a poor imitation of the beauty that is the open world (consider Wikipedia).
Facebook’s story may now become an exact replay of AOL’s: yesterday a walled garden among walled gardens that just happened to have the best content, today the walled garden in an open field. How will Facebook react? Can they adopt OpenSocial?
I see two reasons why Facebook won’t:
- They aren’t part of the original set of adopters, which includes MySpace, which makes me think that they were approached and turned it down already.
- It would be a short-term disasterous move to reject their current developer base by switching their apps platform to something fundamentally incompatible. There’s no obvious way (to me) to provide a simple port of Facebook apps to OpenSocial apps. They’re already locked into what they’ve built.
So, my predictions: someone will create a Facebook app that lets me get my data out of Facebook, specifically exporting my social graph and timeline. Someone else will create an OpenSocial app that allows me to import that data. I will move out of Facebook and never look back.
As an early adopter of most things, I’ll be one of the first people to do so, but after about 5 years Facebook will be dead.
Or perhaps a fairy tale ending: Facebook adopts OpenSocial as a parallel apps platform and walks into the rosy sunset with the rest of the maturing social networks.
