Bingo.. Facebook is the new Passport/Live ID. I knew Facebook was evil the day I tried to sign up and couldn't because I no longer had a school issued email address. Who the hell would want to join a social network of a school you never attended anyways?
 

Umair,

I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. Certainly MS + FB are a good match precisely because a closed Facebook is the kind of platform that MS can understand and love.

I can even see how that parses as "evil". But if you take "evil" to mean "destroying value" then I'm not so sure.

I think the important point to drill-down into is : "what sort of application do you build on a social-network-as-platform?"

Now, if you think of a YASN as a certain kind of media or communication network, then everything you say about the value of, and inevitable triumph of, openness is valid. And if you think of applications like video players or give virtual gifts to your friends, then the walledness of the garden is a problem. Certainly for your way of looking at value as being branding.

But here's the realization I had when I saw Facebook's pitch to application developers : the YASN-as-platform answers a problem which has long plagued "web 2.0" developers. The infamous accusation that focussed web 2.0 companies are building "features" rather than full businesses.

How can a mere "feature" survive as a business? It can't, hence web 2.0 companies look to get bought by Google or Yahoo and incorporated into their portals because they have no business model on their own.

But what I saw in the Facebook ecology was a place where "features" were potentially able to survive as independent elements. No way can A.N.Other calendaring / meeting planner survive out there on the web on its own. Who's going to sign-up, remember to go back and use it, manage to encourage their friends to join etc. in order to make it worth-while?

But on Facebook, with the social network already there, with one-click sign-up and invite your friends, AND MOST CRUCIALLY, the ability for the application to talk to people who aren't already signed-up to it, via the news feed, you can imagine a clever, single task "feature" being able to make it on it's own. Even to find a business model.

It's worth emphasizing that point about the news-feed. *This* is the service that a platform like Facebook can provide to a developer which the web-as-platform can't. Not even OpenID can provide the equivalent of the news-feed. I don't mean technically but *culturally* - what Facebook has is a particular club where people have signed up to be tied together by other communication conventions that don't exist outside it. And Facebook app. developers can take advantage of this convention as a platform resource.

Notice that FB can't just disolve back into the web via opening its protocols, without throwing away these extra conventions. It's not technical, it's social. FB users have already decided to allow themselves to be part of new social practices that non-members haven't. I believe this is going to become more and more explicit as YASN-platforms offer richer tools for defining social conventions, and give users finer grained control. It's their big opportunity : to give *appliciation developers* access to the new social contracts that not only don't exist out on the wild-web, but couldn't exist out on the wild-web.

This *is* potentially evil. People don't necessarily know that they are signing up for these extra conventions. It *is* certainly a way to lock people in. Perhaps Ray Ozzie's web-clipboard will turn out to be a similar convention on MS's web-platform. But it is also adding value that the web with it's open microformats and feeds can't.
 

from j allen [msft]:

To the contrary, I think this scenario is rather different from traditional MSFT platform play. You might not have noticed MSFT was on stage with Facebook at their platform launch, so it's not as if the MSFT interest in platform aspects is new. I responded to Marc A's post about "three platforms" in part rebutting the notion that this model is a traditional PC platform play.

http://www.visitmix.com/Blogs/Joshua/response-to-quotthree-platforms-you-meetquot/

(OTOH, being a long-time loyal reader, I know you have something to say about my "data is the platform" comments.)
 

Umair,

I think your value creation observations are the most compelling out there. Your main point seems fairly similar to Hagel and Singers 'Infomediary' concept, which is a similarity that I think you'd like.

Here's a key quote from the WSJ article you linked to that seems to get it all wrong:

"Some industry executives believe the Internet today is facing the sort of turning point that the computer-operating-system sector confronted two decades ago: Whoever controls the technology platform for buying and selling online ads could hold tremendous power over the Internet Industry for years to come -- much as Microsoft was able to use its Windows operating system to shape the personal computer."

So that being said, I think the Infomediary role is more limited and targeted to verticals, than a wholesale expunging of the Advertising industry. I'm not even seeing the infomediary role really coming into play direclty, just indirectly through Google's model. Am I missing something here? Is the Infomediary similarity wrong?

Sure things will change in decades....or are you supposing dramatic changes within a few years?
 

Umair, you sound even more defensive than Tom Andersen did in the recent Fortune interview. ;-) FB getting to you?

FB is not closed, it's private. There's a significant difference. private != evil. That's ridiculous.

FB was pure genius in teasing out the essential use cases for "private" at the same time that all the fan-boys started clamoring all over themselves to be open. It's a blue ocean and they're kicking butt.

Now as for an MS partnership, I agree that it's cause for skepticism but it's a total stretch to point to this as proof of FB's lack of value.
 

Myspace starting to look a lot like facebook ...

http://mashable.com/2007/09/27/myspace-homepage-upgrades/
 

David G -

Facebook is both private AND closed. They're private in that they let users control how much of their information is accessible by others. You could even argue the fact that they prevent certain people from joining certain groups being "private". But Facebook is also closed in how restrictive they are in outside access to their architecture and how restrictive they are in how a user can customize their own page. That has nothing to do with being private, it has to do with being overly controlling of information that really doesn't belong to them in the first place.