Firefox vs. Facebook
A couple of weeks ago, Jason Kottke published a couple of brilliants posts comparing Facebook today to AOL in the nascent days of the web. Like Jason, I’d like to stress that I have nothing against Facebook as a company. In fact, unlike every social networking app I’ve tried in the past, I find it entirely too addictive and check it at least once a day, more if I’m engaged in a cut-throat game of Roshambull.
I was blown away when Facebook unveiled their apps strategy. I’ve felt for a long time that a highly leveraged online identity is key to the next generation of web applications. Everything from matchmaking to job hunting to discussion forums to shared calendaring requires a strong identity and detailed user profile, with much of the same data (often including a list of people I know) needed for each app. Web apps also need to be much easier to install with a more consistent user experience. Facebook apps do all of this, installing with a single click, piggybacking on your existing profile and integrating cleanly into a unified dashboard with a sidebar, minifeed, etc.
It’s hardly surprising to see innovation like this happening in the walled garden of a high-powered startup rather than in some smoky back room at the W3C. Nonetheless, Jason is absolutely right: the things that make Facebook apps cool will be so much cooler when they are available on the open web. I want all the zero-registration instant installability and harmonized user interface of Facebook apps, but with the ability to deploy my application on my own domain, in the programming language of my choice and without the permission and oversight of another company. I want to be able to contribute at the platform level. And I want much more inter-application integration (implying a common data model of some sort, something Facebook sorely lacks).
Nick Gonzalez spots the trend and hypothesizes that Plaxo’s “social graph” could be the basis of an “open Facebook”. Perhaps, but I feel strongly that the right place to mediate between web apps and web services is in the browser. The obvious candidate to bring us strong identity and a social graph that can be leveraged across applications is Mozilla, whose stated aim is to promote choice on the web. Any walled garden is the natural enemy of this mission. It’s a heady time of change in the web world right now, and I’ve been inclined lately to contend that Mozilla’s primary competition is AIR and Silverlight, not IE and Safari. But maybe, just maybe it’s actually Facebook.
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Firefox’s extensions work only on Firefox (or Moz, whatever). Facebook works for facebook. This whole “open web” thing.. Go Facebook!
Comment by John — 7/19/2007 @ 7:20 pm
What do you think of Facebook’s acqusition of Parakey (which is Blake Ross’ project)?
Comment by Alien — 7/20/2007 @ 9:04 am
John - Firefox has always built on open technologies with the goal of providing interoperability, unlike a platform like Facebook (or MySpace or Google or Yahoo, etc.) who builds for lock in.
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that a proprietary server platform should be replaced by a proprietary client platform. I feel, rather, that the browser needs to be extended with additional capabilities and that Mozilla is perfectly positioned to drive this effort. These capabilities should be based on standards and available to all browsers, just like HTML and JavaScript are.
Comment by Matt — 7/20/2007 @ 9:33 am
Yep, we all might wind up stunned when Redmond will have realized it should buy this up to compete efficiently.
Comment by funTomas — 7/20/2007 @ 9:57 am
nice post matt. but i’ll still take innovation & a rich feature set over openness any day of the week.
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com
Comment by dave mcclure — 7/20/2007 @ 10:36 am