Facebook

Jason Kottke summed up what I don’t like about Facebook as a development platform: it’s AOL all over again.

Some quotes of note, since I know some of you don’t follow links:

Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you’re not a Facebook user, you can’t do anything with the site…nearly everything published by their users is private. Google doesn’t index any user-created information on Facebook. AFAIK, user data is available through the platform but that hardly makes it open…all of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private.

At some point in the future, Facebook may well open up, rendering much of this criticism irrelevant. Their privacy controls are legendarily flexible and precise…it should be easy for them to let people expose parts of the information to anyone if they wanted to. And as Matt Webb pointed out to me in an email, there’s the possibility that Facebook turn itself inside out and be the social network bit for everyone else’s web apps. In the meantime, maybe we shouldn’t be so excited about the web’s future moving onto an intranet.

In other news, I’m no longer the #1 matt casey on google (though yahoo has this blog uncrawled listed at #1).