Applications masquerading as social networks
I finally took a cursory look at FriendFeed today.
In the old days we used to say that every application expands until it reads mail. These days every new application starts out as a social networking platform with a relatively minor application on top. It then becomes a game of trendiness and marketing to reach critical mass. The world is sufficiently fickle and the applications sufficiently diverse that this can happen over and over again.
Without having used it much I can’t really say if FriendFeed truly solves interesting problems. I suspect it does not. It looks to me like a fairly obvious RSS aggregator combined with a social network. OK, kudos to them for having thought of it but brickbats for the chutzpah to try to make it yet another place. FriendFeed isn’t a place, it’s a minor application feature.
I don’t like or trust Facebook but on one level I’ll agree with what they are trying to do. It’s absolutely pointless for me to create, import and maintain separate social networks for each application or trend that comes along.
Should FriendFeed have built a Facebook application? Almost certainly. Are we somehow happier, safer, more productive that they chose to roll their own network? Hardly. Throw in some address book scraping features and if anything they make me less secure. Anyone who types their Facebook or gmail or any other password into some other service is being very optimistic. Application developers who encourage users to do so are being unprofessional.
Is the solution to move everything to Facebook? Of course not. Maybe I was wrong, maybe we really do need the OpenSocial app platform, if only so as to prevent silly things FriendFeed. I still don’t like applications. I prefer protocols like RSS. It’s very hard for me to see FriendFeed as more than trivial aggregator of RSS feeds. I see no benefit in having that run on a central service that will sooner or later be forced to monetize it.
I want a diverse culture of applications and implementations around some focused and well supported protocols. A key enabling technology for any social networking is of course a list of contacts, in other words, a glorified address book. Imagine that along with your email account your ISP also provided an integrated account that enabled social networking simply by providing a way to model relationships with your contacts and to manage access to those relationships (both for users and applications).
Ingredients:
- Identity
- Access control
- Contact List
- Relationship model
- Applications
Am I slowly re-inventing OpenSocial? It seems likely but I know I’m starting from a different set of goals. Either way the journey is valuable and interesting. Thanks for riding along with me this far.