When you create a platform as pervasive as Facebook (which I love by the way) I think you need to do 3 things very well:
1. Be open
This means letting other people/companies develop features that exist within or have access to your site. Facebook gets top marks for this.
2. Be secure
Goes without saying really. Unfortunately after the last week Facebook probably gets a 7 out of 10. From The Register: “Office workers logging into Facebook on Tuesday morning were shocked to discover they were being served up other user’s private pages.“
3. Be reliable
When people integrate a platform into their lives they get really upset when it disappears offline, even for a little while. 6 out of 10 and dropping…
Facebook’s growth over the last year has been completely insane. Any other site would have disintegrated by now and you have to give them kudos for that. But when a site that you rely on so much is “temporarily unavailable” so often it starts to hurt. This is especially frustrating for me this week because I’m trying to organize an event on Facebook.
So come on Mark - let’s get it sorted!
2 responses so far ↓
Sameer Vasta // August 5, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Pema, those are some good thoughts, and while I agree completely with your score you give Facebook on security and reliability (well, maybe I might give their reliability a score slightly lower than six), I would give Facebook the complete opposite of “top marks” when it comes to openness. In fact, I would argue that the Facebook is essentially the complete antithesis of the concept of openness on the web.
Right now, Facebook is forcing me to log into a closed platform, a closed area of the web, in order to access content that is essentially my own to reuse. There is no way for me to repurpose anything I do on Facebook into any other part of my life, web-related or not. A few examples:
There is no way for me to export my Facebook events to my iCal or my Google Calendar. There is no way for me to export basic information from my contacts into my address book as vCards or even as a .csv file. My photos, my notes, and my posted items are all limited to being viewed on Facebook alone and are not easily repurposed to my blog or website. (I know there are ways to do all these things, but they require special hacks that are not inherent to the Facebook structure.) The worst part about all this is not only that Facebook doesn’t allow for repurposing and sharing outside its site, but that they actually vehemently oppose (and sometimes threaten with legal action) programs and applications that do facilitate an open exchange, ensuring that their environment remains closed to the outside world.
While you state that the developers platform has shown openness on Facebook’s part, I would argue that instead, this has proven Facebook’s determination to remain closed: by forcing developers to program special applications that fit into Facebook’s parameters, Zuckerberg and Co have essentially forced normal web users into becoming Facebook users (to go from an open environment to a closed and limited environment) in order to have access to certain kinds of applications and data.
What would have been better is for Facebook to have adopted standards like microformats, to allow for exportability and repurposing, and to allow general web applications to draw upon Facebook content without forcing a user to be a member: if I want to play Scrabble with my friends on Facebook, I should be able to do it even if I’m not a Facebook member - make it a web app, but let people access it through the channels they desire, Facebook or not. I’m not saying the people behind Facebook haven’t thought of this, or that these are not things that are in the pipelines; I’m just saying that as it stands right now, Facebook would struggle to score a 1 out of 10 on my scale of openness.
I agree with Jason Kottke when he says that Facebook is reminiscent of an old property that approached the web in the same closed way. Zuckerberg needs to think about that before we all start to, in a few years, remember poking as fad from the past just like free AOL CDs.
(Wow, I just wrote a lot. I think this warrants a blog post on my own site later this week.)
Eloquation » Blog Archive » Why I deactivated my Facebook account // August 6, 2007 at 11:05 am
[...] wrote about this phenomenon recently as a comment on a blog post by Pema Hegan where he said that Facebook scores high points in openness. I humbly [...]
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