In the context of Facebook’s rejection of Google’s Friend Connect, the Washington Post explores how Competing Interests Threaten Venture . . .
. . . Coming so soon after the highly publicized launch, it was an embarrassing rift for both sides. Many view the ongoing standoff as a contest with far-reaching implications for Web socializing.
In the common social networks, people communicate, organize and socialize largely within sites — such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn — but not outside of them. This model, referred to in geek parlance as the “walled garden,” ensures that social networking sites get immense traffic and screen time from members, and the revenue that comes with that.
Many in the industry are proposing a different model, however, in which every Web site will have a social aspect. In this scenario, there will be no need for a person to confine socializing to MySpace or Facebook. People could tap into their information — contacts and pictures — as they roam the Web. The social networking sites would function more like a utility, storing a person’s contacts, photographs and other tidbits. . . .
In the context of Facebook’s rejection of Google’s Friend Connect, the Washington Post explores how Competing Interests Threaten Venture . . .
. . . Coming so soon after the highly publicized launch, it was an embarrassing rift for both sides. Many view the ongoing standoff as a contest with far-reaching implications for Web socializing.
In the [...]
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@ 07:16
This, of course, is exactly why some eschew services like Facebook, MySpace, and even twitter: We don’t want to feel captured or captive. But there are realities of opportunity cost to any implementation. Building a distributed standard to implement social networking will come at the cost of ease of use for early adopters. Facebook and such provide that ease of use, at the cost of being captured. To the extent that social networking is a profit oriented pursuit we will see more of the latter than the former.