4 Comments »In a small but significant change, Facebook has removed the text at the bottom of all videos which provides users with a way to publicly share those videos. Why Facebook decided to eliminate public video sharing I’m not quite sure. One reason could be that they simply want all individuals that view a video to be active users of the site.
What makes this change relatively significant is that it is a move toward become more of a walled garden and not less of one. As Facebook opens up through Facebook Connect, one would expect more open sharing to take place. Even Mark Zuckerberg said last week at Web 2.0 Summit that the public sharing of feeds is possible in the future.
For the time being though there is little need for the company to have an open policy. One of the major reasons is that there is no open competitor that has anywhere near the same number of users. While FriendFeed provides a completely open feed, the site currently has less than 1 million active users according to Compete.com.
Twitter has almost 4 million active users but it’s still a fraction of the size of Facebook which continues to grow by millions of users a month. We thing Facebook would be better off if it was more open with the content users are entering. Then again, the more content they have access to inside the wall, the less that Google has access to, leaving social discovery to something that takes place within Facebook.
I’ve said it before - data ( its’ format, access method,etc.) has changed and will continue to change with technology. Sharing is a must if the content requires that it be publicly shared vs. private. Any tech history will tell you that. Old business school thinking that controlling data be the means to be #1 is bad business. I get posts from all social sites and watch videos from Youtube via Tivo & IPTV providers. Open Access, Security and content (quality) will prevail vs. status quo.
It’s simpler than that. Facebook has no sustainable business model, so this is a reaction born out of fear more than anything else. Their data is sacred, and until they can figure out how to monetize it, they’re hoping to keep it under wraps. Moves like this ensure that they’re always in the loop.
Although I rather have this feature than not, one can just upload their public video on something like youtube or vimeo and then share it on facebook.
I think this is most likely part of their “reduction” design principle outlined by Julie Zhuo at F8 - I guess this feature just probably wasn’t being used so they removed it in the interest of simplification.