Facebook Platform Becomes Pipe Dreams for Some
Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 5th, 2007 3:28 PMLast night, Mark Cuban released a well composed post in which he suggested that Facebook open up their API to other partners so that they can leverage the collective intelligence gained from Facebook profile data. While Mark’s suggestion is a great one, there is no way in hell that this would ever occur. Could you see Google completely opening up access to their massive databases simply so that smaller companies can leverage the information that they have stored.
While it may be in the best interest of society to have unrestricted access to any company’s data for the purpose of improve service offerings, the companies that spent so much time and investment building that data would immediately lose their competitive advantage. While I agree that Facebook should open up and enable identities to be transportable, why would Facebook provide Yahoo with access to their data? In theory, Facebook has the capability to attack the people search market and there is no way that they are going to simply license away that opportunity (unless of course the license fee was billions of dollars each year).
As both Tim O’Reilly and Mark suggest, OpenSocial is an incomplete solution and is nowhere near as open as many of us were hoping for. This is not to say that this won’t change though. I’m sure that Google is working to make this platform more open and this is just a first step. Tim O’Reilly states that “we all want what Mark describes: a definitive place under our own control where we can describe who we are and what we care about so that applications can use that data to provide us with smarter services.”
I don’t want that. Honestly, in order for the general web to be able to provide smarter services to me they are going to need a lot more personal information. While I have voluntarily provided that information to Facebook as a means for communicating that information to my friends, I in no way want the entire web to have access to that info. Otherwise, what Mark and Tim are beginning to ask for is something in which an all knowing database can be queried so that our interactions with other virtual sites can have a better understanding of us. Do we really want that? If this was the government owning this information we would be up in arms.
I’m sorry but we are starting to push the boundaries of privacy and if we push to far we may in fact begin to create more security issues then we know how to deal with. Am I the only person that thinks collective personal intelligence is something that while capable of providing better services is too large of a risk?
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It's good to open te debate though, because the whole web industry is getting really excited at the idea to use more personal datas to increase their ad dollars.
Should online networks ask their users if they agree to such actions, kind of like a democratic voting system?
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As we move forward, Facebook and other social networking sites need to find a way to make sure that advertisements are not a bombardment, rather a compliment to the user experience. I think this is the only disadvantage to how everyone is getting so excited about Facebook, which is that the market is not mature enough yet - we don't know if social networking is the big thing to monetize, even though we can agree the premise is intriguing.
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They have opened it up (albeit not completely so); I remember using the Google API for personal projects, years ago. But the Facebook stuff is only accessible within the context of Facebook.
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