> "This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit with associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry"
(remember this was written 23 years ago).
And so now, looking at Facebook, I see some similar features. They have their own email; their own "CB simulator"; etc.
Um, when people start waking up they will realize that it isn't, hasn't ever, and will never work. Facebook only functions on one core input; your demographic info. I would bet significant amounts of money that Facebook has permanently backed up everyone's demographic info for all eternity. It is the vulnerable point in the Facebook deathstar. No one already looks at or intentionally clicks on any adds on Facebook, imagine how difficult it would be to sell marketers that facebook flavored bull if the user demographics were junk info.
The thing about permanently backed up demographic info though: it changes. My age, for example, changes every year. My location changes every few years. My interests change. Hell, even gender changes.
All of those things are fairly trivial for FB to track. Age (obvious), Location (trackable through Places, geolocation, etc. through that thing in your pocket), Gender (presumably you would post a status update about something that big?), Employment (status, amassing colleagues as 'friends'?).
It seems like they've hit on a constantly self-updating demographic info machine...
I was referring to your mention of "permanently backed up", i.e., stale demographic information, whose value decreases predictably with time. While FB is in business, you're spot on.
Demographic info may not be the only thing they know about. Given a lot of sites embed some sort of Facebook widget on their pages, they have a tracking mechanism.
If I had not explicitly signed-out of Facebook before visiting all these other sites, Facebook knows about it. And maybe also the browsing habits of people in my network. That gives a really deep profile about me - a lot more than just my demographics.
Check out screen shots of their respective ad platforms in that article: the level of targeting that is possible with Facebook (which is only going to become deeper, given all the additional details they are gathering about me) is simply not possible with Google. This is one major reason why Google is pushing hard with Google+
"If I had not explicitly signed-out of Facebook before visiting all these other sites, Facebook knows about it."
Even if you have explicitly signed-out of Facebook, the presence of the like button on a site allows Facebook to track your movements on that site. Their like button javascript reports back a unique login cookie that is not erased when you sign off of Facebook. Pressing the like button is a small part of its purpose. Its purpose is to track you around the web as long as you have ever logged into Facebook before. This was all covered here on HN months ago, when I first learned of it.
They're worried about search but Facebook hasn't even tried any kind of search yet. Personally I'm not convinced they're as dangerous and plugged in as people think. Everything they've done seems to me to be the most obvious thing every time (e.g. instead of selling info to advertisers they just dump email addresses) and quite lazy.
They won't stop or slow down until something else makes them irrelevant.
I so hope open data combined with web-intents and a slew of standardized service-negotiation protocols comes and solves this in a final, crushing, open move.
Want event-management? Fine. That's data. Stored in your calendar. Which can be stored and managed somewhere else, just loosely connected, with OAuth to make sure nothing bad happens.
Want participant-management for those events? Fine. That's data attached to your events. Which can use your contact-data as a source. Which can be stored and managed somewhere else, just loosely connected, to one or many services, with OAuth to make sure nothing bad happens.
Want photos tied to those events? That's data. You get the idea. There should be no need to consolidate all your stuff one place. We don't do it in real life and we shouldn't have to do it on the internet either.
I dream of an internet composed of micro-services of open data talking together, composing new wonderful things.
You use the service which you think does things best for the things it does best, and you use other services for things you think they do better. You put together your own cloud of services and data.
In this world, horrible and monolithic beasts like facebook are not only not needed. They are not wanted.
We just need to standardize. We just need to chisel out the semantics of how we hook services together in a way which normal users can handle.
This is the only true path I can see forward, which stays true to the roots of the internet. This is the one path maximizing freedom, choice and reliability through network distribution.
That's right; facebook, google, apple and possibly others are on a course of mutually assured destruction. If they neglect any aspect of social networking (mail, friends, shopping, instant messaging) they fear that dominance in one aspect will lead to dominance in all.
I don't see any of them winning out, certainly not Google. Google did pretty well with email though personally I haven't touched my gmail in years (I let my iphone client manage it) and search seems extremely vulnerable to me. It's clear at this point that they're never going to "get" social.
Their end goal is to be the entire Internet in a curated show-you-only-what-you-agree-with-so-you-click-on-more-things model.
They won't stop or slow down until something else makes them irrelevant.