Facebook unveiled some gigantic new features yesterday. For those who don’t pay attention to digital media as heavily as I do, there is a good summary here:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook/
You can also check out Robert Scoble’s Twitter favorite links which are basically a bunch of FB-related links:
http://twitter.com/scobleizer/favorites
I’ll tip my hand as well and do a very quick summary:
- FB wants to be the “identity” system on the web. This has been around for awhile — it was called Facebook Connect. The difference now is that while Facebook Connect required that every time a website wanted to use your Facebook identity to “log you in”, you had to say “OK”. Now you will say OK once and this permission will stick forever, for every website (to be fair it remains to be seen what level of granularity FB adds to the identity control — this will likely evolve).
- FB has added a “like” feature and is trying to help developers integrate it into their websites. See (3) for why this is important.
- FB has substantially “opened up” its data to outside developers. While I won’t go into the technical details here, a use case will suffice — when you go to nytimes.com to read some news, stuff your friends have read and “liked” might be visible to you in a bar on the right side. Or when you go to the Pandora.com to listen to music, you might be able to create a channel out of “stuff my friends have liked.”
- FB implemented some other more minor stuff like a virtual currency. Virtual currencies are going to be huge, but we’re not quite there yet, so this is not as important as (1) – (3).
The Facebook announcement is definitely a big deal. While FB has been telegraphing the company’s ultimate goal — to have most of our internet activity pass through Facebook in some way, shape, or form — for awhile, the ambition to announce this intention now in one fell swoop with simultaneous integration into some of the most popular web destinations is ballsy. As Dave Winer blogs, “[Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] is like a young Bill Gates”, i.e. tremendously ambitious and one-step ahead of the rest of us (for awhile, anyhow). In my opinion, however, this move — i.e. these new features — is going to fail. It’s not going to fail spectacularly, it’s just going to fizzle out.
The bottom line is that Facebook represents our digital “purely social” presence. Facebook is where we all have pictures of us on vacation, hanging out, clubbing (that’s me), and partying. Facebook is where we make sarcastic jokes on friends’ walls. Our Facebook Persona is not the persona we want representing us everywhere.
Is it the side of me I want representing me when I’m listening to music? Sure. When I’m playing games? Sure.
When I’m doing research? Nope. When I’m interacting professionally? Nope. When I’m even reading news, blogs, digital media? Nope.
So in my opinion, we’re not going to want this “identity” logging into websites for us. But there’s more to this play — Facebook wants to gather one-sided “interest” data from us (read: good advertiser targeting data). This is an area where it’s been losing for awhile, mainly to Twitter, which is built around interests. The problem with Facebook is that heretofore, its major relationship has been reciprocal. If I’m “friends” with someone, they must be “friends” with me. This is a good structure for doing some things like sharing vacation photos, but it’s a bad structure for other things like following interests. Facebook’s new “Like” feature is an attempt to allow us to create more “one-sided” relationships with stuff out there (from articles to celebrities), but it’s too little too late for me. Take a look at the “sharing features” from the Tech Crunch summary article I linked above: 1071 tweets about it (Twitter), 243 “likes” (Facebook). People are much more apt to tweet about stuff they’re interested in because they know anyone following them is (loosely) interested in the same stuff.
Now you may say “sure, I buy a lot of what you’re saying, but I still think Facebook has the leverage to pull this off’, and it’s hard for me to disagree. But will Facebook execute? Facebook has made a lot of mistakes (Beacon anyone?) on privacy and a mistake that damages us professionally or personally and is communicated outside FB’s walled garden could be the “last straw” for many people. It remains to be seen how well Facebook will manage this risk while executing on all other cylinders and trying to pull off what amounts to an enormous coup. I don’t want to write too much about this subject, but suffice it to say, as I said above, I think many people will end up turning off the “connect” features that allow everyone to use our FB identity as our main web identity, and I think the attempt to garner the “one-sided” interest knowledge that has been so sorely lacking for FB will fail as well because FB just doesn’t have the brand for it. Fan pages have been a pretty spectacular failure — Like will be less so, but still a pretty big one.
Anyway, that’s my bet.
