How Does Facebook View the World?
Posted by Chris Saad, under Facebook, Features, Opinion, Privacy, Social Media, contributor, data portability, editorial, open technology, social contracts
Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo, the world’s leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. He is also the co-author of the Synaptic Web Strawman, co-author of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founder of the DataPortability Project.
Last week, I wrote a post calling out Mark Zuckerberg for making a correlation between Facebook’s privacy issues and their altruistic pursuit of data portability.
Today I’d like to do something a little different. I’d like to examine some of the reasons why Facebook is finding it challenging to either a) implement data portability, or b) communicate about issues of privacy or data portability — and why ultimately, that might be OK, in the sense that it leaves room for the rest of the web to innovate.
I will examine the issue in three parts. These parts, I believe, make up the crux of any reasonable criticism of Facebook at this time.
Data Portability vs. Interoperability
First, Facebook tends to discuss data portability without acknowledging the significance of open standards and interoperability.
Data portability is not just allowing users to access their data. There is a silent “Interoperable” before the phrase that means the data, and the protocols to get it, need to be based on open standards and be interchangeable. Letting people code against your API is not the same as building the API in such a way that others (i.e. social aggregators or networks) could participate in the transactions just as easily.
Facebook’s challenge, however, is that they are pioneering many of these interactions and can’t necessarily wait for standards to emerge or crystallize before acting.
Standards emerge after a good pattern gets established. In many ways, Facebook’s leadership in demonstrating these patterns at scale shows the way (and provides the market momentum and emotional fuel) for standards to emerge. See the OExchange announcement earlier this week, for example.
The challenge for Facebook here is to balance their need (and obvious appetite) for innovation with architectural choices that allow for open standards and interoperable protocols to be absorbed by their system. To show true commitment, they must also quickly adopt standards as they emerge.
Taking these steps would put them in good position to avoid the Internet-scale forces that often reject proprietary platforms as fast as they emerge. In addition to decisive action, if Facebook clearly acknowledged this to stakeholders, it would go a long way.
Will they make these decisions rather than pay lip service? That seems unlikely.
Social Contracts vs. Open Culture
Second, Facebook confuses privacy concerns with anger over a violation of their social contract with users, specifically with regard to people pushing back on the general goal of human openness.
The potential for social media to make the world a more transparent and connected place is real and significant. I don’t think that any rational person who seriously considers the trends could argue against the idea that people sharing more in public, and reading more about others, could reduce fear born from any sense of ‘us’ vs ‘them’.
I don’t think that anyone really challenges Mark Zuckerberg on this point when he makes it. They shouldn’t.
The challenge for Facebook, however, is they began with a social contract — a promise to their users — of a private place for sharing amongst mutually confirmed friendships.
To their credit as a company, they want to continue to push the boundaries, and innovate and evolve as quickly as the market. And the market has evolved. Thanks to Flickr, Twitter and others, public is the new default, and Facebook needs to keep up. For them to change direction towards these open defaults, however, they must declare this intention clearly and unequivocally.
The team at Facebook tries to talk about the need for an open and connected society, and have continued to make incremental steps in this direction. But they have really failed to put it in the context of their history and our future. They need to tell the story of a cultural trend towards openness and explain that while they started as private place, their (new) unashamed goal is move towards a public one.
Doing it in small steps without explaining the end goal or the reason, or even acknowledging the fundamental shift, is a big (and unnecessary) source of criticism.
Open Culture vs. Open Technology
Third, Facebook tends to use the word ‘open’ without drawing a distinction between culture and technology
When the team at Facebook talks about wanting to make the world more “open,” I, and others who care about such things, hear them cloaking themselves in the mantra of Open Technologies when they are actually talking about open/transparent/public culture.
Trying to draw the distinction between Open Technology vs. Open Culture is difficult for Facebook, considering that their audience is not that of our little echo chamber but rather a very mainstream community that does not understand such nuance. So in some regards, glossing over these distinctions is understandable given their target market.
The problem, though, is that making the world a more open place using closed technologies all routed through a single company is not the way it can or should work.
A more interoperable, peer-to-peer method of achieving cultural transparency is critical for there to be true openness (of both kinds). There is an architecture that would allow each node (read: user/site/service) to be a first class citizen on the interoperable social web and to choose how public or private it is when it comes to sharing.
Facebook might know this, but their job is not to create an interoperable social web. They are the market leader — the clear winner — and as Dave McClure likes to say, “Open is for losers.” The nice thing about the web, though, is there are a lot of big, important, well funded and motivated losers who will ensure that Open will win in the end.
Facebook’s job, however, is to capitalize on their momentum and network effects to create maximum value for their shareholders. This is not ‘evil’ or even necessarily undesirable. Because like with open standards, oftentimes until someone shows the industry how it’s done (and frankly lights a fire under its butt), it’s often hard for us all to collectively imagine what the future might look like.
The challenge for Facebook — one they are more than capable of facing – is keeping up with the inevitable opening of the walls and the peering of the nodes. They are the most agile and innovative company at scale that has ever existed on the Internet. If anyone can do it, they can. The only question is, can the rest of the community execute as well?
Conclusion
In these three areas — Data Portability vs. Interoperability, Social Contracts vs. Open Culture, Open Culture vs. Open Technology — Facebook has made big moves and very high profile blunders. Their challenges are great and their ability to execute with ambition first, ask questions later and quickly clean up the mess is the very reason for their success.
Are these blunders a series of accidental missteps (a combination of ambition, scale and hubris) or a calculated risk to force their world view on unsuspecting users (easier to ask for forgiveness)? Only the executives at Facebook can ever truly answer this question.
What’s clear, though, is that their platform is tightly coupled with countless other websites and applications across the web, and their financial success is aligned with many influential investors and actors. At this stage, and at this rate, their continued success is all but assured.
But so is the success of the rest of the web. Countless social applications emerge every day and the rest of the web is, and always will be, bigger than any proprietary platform. Through its action and inaction, Facebook offers opportunities for us all. And in the dance between their moves and the rest of the web’s, innovation can be found.
The only thing that can truly hurt the web is a monopoly on ideas, and the only ones who can let that happen are web users themselves.
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More Facebook resources from Mashable:
- Why Facebook’s Privacy War Is Not Over
- Why Facebook Must Get Serious About Privacy
- 4 Tips for B2B Marketing on Facebook
- In Defense of Facebook
- The Local Advertising War Will Be a Clash of the Internet Titans
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alwyncooper
Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, Internet, Twitter, iStockphoto
Tags: data portability, editorial, facebook, open technology, privacy, social contracts, social media
Dallas Lawrence is Managing Director of 
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