This afternoon I’ve been watching the Google OS announcement and all I can say is that this is what Mark Zuckerberg first announced when they released Platform, two and a half years ago. Many assumed that the acquisition of Parakey was a step toward truly building the web operating system of the future. Blake Ross, the developer of Firefox and Parakey, has been working on Facebook Lite though. Joe Hewitt, the other Parakey developer, had been working on the Facebook iPhone application until recently. So where is Facebook OS?
Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed Facebook as the “social operating system” and ultimately it has become just that to a certain extend. The largest issue is that utility focused applications have never done well on Facebook because it doesn’t function as a full blown operating system yet. In other words, you don’t spend all your time from within Facebook. Instead you spend the vast majority of from within a web browser.
If you want to listen to Google’s explanation of the problem in an overly enthusiastic tone, you can watch the video below. Now it’s very possible that Facebook is still working on the truly “social operating system”. Facebook has had a significant impact on all new platforms including the iPhone platform, the Google Android operating system, and all other social platforms on the web. The primary feature that Facebook innovated was notifications (which is now being depricated) as well as the stream, and I’d argue that Facebook was a catalyst for the multi-platform wars.
The number of platforms for developers to build on has increased dramatically in just the past two and a half years and Facebook has proven to be one of the leading platforms. With Facebook appearing to move away from being a destination site in the future, one would only expect Facebook to continue moving forward with the original vision of becoming the “social operating system”. The only question now is whether or not the vision has been lost or if one day we’ll actually have the choice of booting up our devices with Facebook, the social operating system.
Most people use IE. No one is going to use a facebook browser. this reminds me of how a few years back every company wanted u to download THEIR stupid toolbars.
Netscape also tried to do this over a decade ago, by accepting Java into the browser and allowing the creation of “applets”…that went nowhere. Not being too pessimistic, but the adoption of an environment that incorporates your day to day work requirements has already been done and is called…an operating system. Enveloping your applications within another platform can increase choice concerning where to do your work, but it is a layer of redundancy that will not have as much impact as an OS will.
yeah I’m so sold…. NOT!!! (sorry for the childish speech, was just trying to emulate Mr. Cool D00d… from the vid)
Innovate, schminnovate…its soooo tedious, listening to every (fill in the name of your favorite tech company, here) fan, anxious to grab vicarious credit for this minor idea or that incidental feature.
Its sounds too much like a bunch of pensioners who sit around a pot-bellied stove, telling lies. Worse, it put me mind of patent-trolls.* Right now, all that matters is results. So, you can either show me the goods – an intact, useful product that improves/brightens my daily life, at an attractive price – or put a cork in it.
I’ve yet to see any such thing, from FB. Rather, it looks like yet another walled garden with a heavy emphasis on UGC…like AOL, circa 1997. And I suspect FB will end up in much the same way. Will their operations generate lots of money, before then? Oh, sure. But will they contribute much to the tech-community, in terms of useful IP? Uh, no.
* “We invented ‘Click here!’ No, seriously!”
Fact is that Chrome OS is only a netbook platform and Google’s desktop operating system is the real Windows killer. Facebook is the most popular social network to date and Google is not trying to become a better Facebook though a(n) operating system.
If Google wants to establish a better social network then Facebook, it will be a simple website with all of Google’s features including third-party services. An operating system is only a system which has abilities to do what you would want it to do.
IMHO HTML5 with all the built in media management will be the biggest jump toward NON-MS os we’ve had in a long time. If you spend most of your computer time in a browser (like i do for both work and play) then why pay for an OS or use a new and untested one. HTML5+Linux will be the OS for the masses.
The video…. the video….
Ughhh. Do they ask him to say grammatically incorrect words to sound cool or likeable? THERE’S NO “S” SOUND AT THE END OF THE WORD ANYWAY. EVER!
Two things strike me as I watch this video. 1) there is a very deliberate effort to avoid mentioning Facebook, and I don’t even think I heard the phrase “social network.” That only shows how concerned Google is about Facebook’s inroads, because statistically for a growing number of users of the Net worldwide Facebook is their primary activity.
2) If Google takes this path, the current concerns among antitrust regulators worldwide will grow dramatically larger. An OS controlled by Google would raise the prospect that it might in a very Microsoftian way begin to subtly or not-subtly discriminate against competitive services like Yahoo Mail and especially Facebook.
300 million is not the world. Personaly I won’t be using a FB OS or Google. 1) I’m not on Facebook (tired of stalking people who don’t actually say anything to eachother, and I don’t want to be stalked), and 2) Google I just don’t trust.
You know, if you turn your computer off, all this goes away.
Farley, congrats on not using Facebook and Google. They’ll be sending you a sweet prize** for your efforts and achievements in avoiding popular things.
**May be made of tinfoil. May be a hat.
This is a solution to a problem Google helped create. Google wants applications to move to the cloud. Why? Better maintenance (you don’t upgrade the application, a systems administrator in the cloud upgrades the application for you), smaller installed base (even if more users use the software) and as a result, more frequent updates. There is a requirement that websites appear as interactive as desktop apps. Hence Google’s purchase of Keyhole (which a Microsoft VP pointed to as an example, 5 years ago, of why you couldn’t possibly move away from desktop apps), and Google’s experiments with Google Mail and Google Docs (and of course, the competitor Zoho!).
Big problem – web browsers used to run all of this in a SINGLE PROCESS. You wouldn’t want to have Microsoft Excel, Word, and Outlook all running in a single process (maybe even one thread!), but that is exactly what happened with web browsers until a year ago. Now imagine Outlook dies on you; you can still use Excel. (Word is a touch subject; Outlook uses Word to render mail messages). Unfortunately, with the old web browsers, everything you had open would die too.
The biggest drivers for a Web OS – speed, and fault isolation. Which is why Microsoft Research is also looking into this (see Gizelle) and many browsers started having threads for each tab that is open.
This is also why Google is investing in SVG (Graphics like Flash and .NET components for your browser! see SVGweb) and an updated javascript engine (V8) (like C# and VB for your .NET GUI components!).
Of course Google isn’t referring to Facebook! Facebook may have many apps in the cloud, but it presents itself as a single portal to your browser, just like many enterprise applications.
A computer is only as obsolete as the software it is running. It seems as though the more powerful computers are getting, the slower applications become. With all this focus as to where the future of computing is headed. What happened to the optimization of an OS kernel? You honestly don’t believe that this will bite the industry in the ass later? I believe that Google has the right idea, at least. Chrome is FAST. Attention to user experience is nice. C’mon son. Say what you will. They have to get points for that at least…