It has recently occurred to me that a great many social networks, like myspace and facebook are essentially just blog templates, connected together, more difficult to modify, and more difficult to get your data out of. Personally i’m going to lobby that fimoculous.com turn itself into a social network in conjunction with wordpress, because as a template it kicks facebooks ass as a “life aggregator”.
I can just hear the cries now of “what about how open source facebook is with its facebook markup and developer program”, now how is facebooks crippled FBML, FQL and “roach motel” approach to your data better than fully developed languages and standards like xhtml, css, PHP, and mysql? I think Facebooks current value proposition is better for developers than it is users. Applications are certainly proliferating but 90% of them are useless.
Maybe i’m just burning out with having 4 different wall applications, including super wall, fun wall, and the wall.
For further argument along these lines you can also read “are social networks the AOL’s of Web2.0
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If you’re going to title an article “Emperors New Clothes – Facebook just a blog template” shouldn’t you make your argument in the body? I mean, with a title that ridiculous you’ve got to expect people to read it.
Well I was actually aiming to spark some discussion, I think facebook isn’t much more than a blog template for people, just as myspace is as well. My question is what is going to give them a sustainable competitive advantage if that’s all it is. I appreciate the feedback though, I have linked to a previous article where I discuss in a bit further detail why I don’t think social networks that just aggregate eyeballs aren’t building anything sustainable. Again my litmus test for the sustainability of social networks is “if everyone left the social network what value would remain?”
By logic, does this mean I can now call Fimoculous “just a social networking site”?
I think there’s something to this. Aggregation and social connections are the peanut butter and chocolate of social software right now. The problem with Facebook (or rather, one of the problems) is that it’s too generic. Someone’s going to figure out how to do this in a more vertical area — sports, local news, miniature gnome collecting, whatever — and then Facebook will be forced to crack itself open and basically become the Google of identity systems.
lol, i don’t think Fimoculous will ever be “just” anything
Certainly more people are using facebook than “openID” and i’ve heard it proposed that Facebook could become the universal ID system, but only if they open up for sure. Otherwise someone will figure out how to do this better and smoke Facebook.
I think you’re right.
I believe that the next step in social media will be ‘distributed social networks’, where there’s not one site or platform that will be a winner (like google, amazon, etc). Instead all individuals will own their respective networks at all times.
Users are going to decide which network they need when they need it (adhocracy). Current networks like facebook/linkedin will become either obsolete or nothing more than ‘open storage facilities’ for contacts. A standard identity protocol will arise (like openID, but maybe Facebook will develop one backed by a larger userbase) for authentication in any given network and XML / microformats / etc will do the rest.
Adhoc networks will be created on demand on any device (we’ll definitely see a strong rise in mobile – contextual – social networks) that communicates an open/standard language. This will give users an unprecedented level of privacy, flexibility and value.
I think there’s always been a 2-3 year turn around with social apps and there always will be.
The only universal ID that has had any staying power is email addresses.
I’d heard of openID but the thought of an opensource competitors to facebook/myspace is an interesting one.
While facebook is clearly in the ascent it’ll be interesting to see if the pattern of the facebook-myspace switch happens again away from facebook.
I’m still undecided
What do you mean by ‘Again my litmus test for the sustainability of social networks is “if everyone left the social network what value would remain?”’? Surely the POINT of a social network is the people? Or are you saying that something like Flickr, if it could lose the people but keep their photos rather than having them disappear when people cancelled their accounts, would still have photos?
I love the idea of Facebook as a blog template, and Fimoculous is a great example. The thing Facebook does that Fimoculous doesn’t is of course to feed my my friends’ life aggregation as well as simply organise my own. Facebook is a personalised, if rather basic, life aggregator and an RSS reader for other peoples’ life logs, which rocks.
I want my own Fimoculous now!
Absolutely Jill, social networks are about the people, my point about what value they create, is that value creation is IMHO one of the only things that will sustain a social network over the long term. I don’t literally think people will up and leave a social network entirely, I mean friendster didn’t go away, it just shrunk when everyone went to myspace. It’s more of a thought experiment as a way to evaluate the value a social network has. In that experiment, flickr, and yelp do a lot better than myspace and facebook.