Splinter the Social
Facebook is taking increasing amounts of heat for it’s change from having a subtle yet obvious intent to take over the internet to rolling out features openly advancing the goal of ruling the internet. A widening set of media outlets are bringing a spreading range of criticisms about recent Facebook changes. In the last two days, I heard a segment on NPR and read a blog post from the Economist that both took the social network to task. Not the usual outlets for Facebook bashing.
The bad news for Facebook is that it will not take over the web. The social networking model that will end up prevailing is LinkedIn. More focused social networks that are designed around solving a single related set of problems are easier to monetize and provide more concrete benefits to trade to users in return for their privacy. LinkedIn answers the question of “Do I know someone who knows someone that works at that company I want to work for?” This is very useful and well implemented without too much excess garbage.
Two more obvious questions that Facebook tries to address but are likely to drift to more focused sites are “Do I know someone who knows someone that has bought one of these?” and “Do I know someone who is playing this game?” Purpose built services will do a better job of answering these questions and be more attractive to advertisers.
Users want more granular control of who they share which type information with. This was clearly demonstrated by the privacy flub of Google’s Buzz launch. Advertisers like to know the intention of people seeing their ads. If I do a google search on a specific laptop model, my intent to buy a laptop is pretty clear and that is a valuable ad. In the same way, users of LinkedIn are probably interested in looking for work and are open to relevant advertising.
Importing email contacts provides enough network portability from site to site that having a network aggregator to tie everything together is unnecessary. Facebook will keep adding users at a breakneck pace, but the lucrative services and users will end up being siphoned off to other bits of the web eventually. So rather than thinking of Facebook as an overarching evil, we should think of it as an overreaching gateway. Hopefully it will figure out what it is good for someday.
