

Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed - bdfh42
http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/19/why-microsoft-will-buy-facebook-and-keep-it-closed/

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1gor
Why panic? AOL tried 'fenced garden' approach in its days and it did not work.
Why should Microsoft/Facebook be any different? And AOL then had much larger
relative market share than Facebook has today.

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Tichy
Apparently it did not bother people before that Facebook is not crawlable. If
someone chooses to publish his stuff on Facebook, fine by me. One more thing
to safely ignore.

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brlewis
As shown in the upcoming vs. facebook example in the article, ignoring
Facebook is hard to do if you want to organize an event and get lots of people
to come.

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Tichy
Is "Le Web 08" organized solely via Upcoming.org and Facebook, or do they have
their own registration service? Many people might have seen the announcement
on Upcoming, but might not have added their avatar to the listing.

I think random Google searches are also not the most common way to attract
people to such conferences.

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aneesh
Exactly. Random Google searches _aren't_ the way to attract people to such
conferences. But an invitation from a friend with similar interests also
attending the conference is! facebook 1, Google 0.

If you think about it, what _is_ Google the way to do? Anything involving
people, and facebook wins. Flickr is Google-searchable. Facebook Photos is
not. But facebook Photos wins, at least among young adults.

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Tichy
If that's what people want... Email also isn't searchable, yet people managed
to inform each other about conferences via email for years.

No doubt Facebook is a certain power on the internet. I still cling to the
"social networks are like nightclubs" theory, though, and expect people to
move on. I simply can't imagine Facebook dominating everything, because I
personally don't like it.

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henning
Good thing most of the value on the web is not contained within Facebook.

From Google's perspective, it's just one more pile of crap to route around,
and it's your own incompetence at SEO if you put your valuable content behind
a walled garden that can't be indexed.

This is how Google has the Blagowebosphere by the balls: it's very much in
your interest for Google to be able to access all your content robotically at
any time in any way it pleases.

This is _serious business_ , people.

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nir
Why does anyone care what Scoble thinks? His prediction record is somewhat
less than stunning.

Isn't it obvious by now that Scoble & A-list bloggers are just as clueless and
hype-prone as mainstream media? Or are we still waiting for Silverlight to
reboot the Web?

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olefoo
Scoble faces some of the same pressures and and incentives as the mainstream
media; a need to be relevant, timely and first. It is what defines the
'A-list'; they are the bloggers who most resemble the establishment media.

That said, on this issue I think I agree with him, but my response is
different; as a facebook refusenik and Crotchety Old Guy (Tm) I'm all for
Microsoft borging Facebook and sinking into a giant quagmire of Suck; I just
hope they don't take Flickr and the better parts of Yahoo! with them.

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mlinsey
Pairing Facebook's closed data with a general search engine is probably a good
idea, but what's missing from Scoble's post is why MS would need to buy
Yahoo's search engine in order to do this. MS has their own search engine,
which isn't as technically advanced as Google's but is probably on par with
Yahoo's, despite it's much lower marketshare.

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omfut
I don’t agree with Robert on this one. Google has billion of pages and data to
crawl and index. Facebook data might still be worth; nevertheless it’s not
that big of deal for Google to worry about. Microsoft already has an ad deal
on facebook; I don’t see a rationale behind buying facebook for search

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mattmaroon
That XKCD comic was actually funny. I now have to rethink everything I thought
I knew about the world.

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LPTS
It makes my brain hurt how dumb Scoble is. I've never done any heroin in my
life, but every time I read Scoble it makes me want to find the fattest,
rustiest needle I can, load it with heroin mixed with whatever mystery powders
I can find, and jam the whole works as far as it will go right through my
eyeball into an artery deep in my brain. Because feeling my brain dying from
an intraventricular brain injection of way too much heroin, comet bleach, and
flea powder would be better than how I feel after reading Scoble.

In this case, I want to replace my cerebrospinal fluid with dangerous
narcotics and harsh industrial chemicals because of two particular stupid as
fuck comments.

"We will never get an open Web back if these two deals happen."

Um. No. We will. Because microo!softbook will be a monstrous nightmare that
will be plagued by a Vista-like level of incompetence of creating applications
that are pleasant to use. Meanwhile, cool young people, who all have macs
anyway, having realized that while their parents had to use shitty computers,
they don't, will have already eschewed microsoft before it became the sterile
chimera microo!softbook, will stop using facebook, because, hey, it's 2009 or
2010 and facebook was so 2003. Besides, it turns out that Ning in better and
closer to the maclike good experience they expect anyway.

"This has created HUGE value for Microsoft and has handed Steve Ballmer an
Internet strategy which brings Microsoft from last place to first in less than
a week."

Um...this hasn't created any value. It certainly doesn't bring them into first
place in a week. How do I know? Because I'm not a moron like scoble. In order
for this to work, steve ballmer would have to successfully execute this
strategy. Steve Ballmer is too disconnected from the experience of the end
user to do this. He is not able to be the visionary and he's also not able to
correctly recognize either this flaw, or the person who he should delegate the
job too, as evidenced by the massive failures in Vista and the X-Box
production problems. I don't mean to be trashing Ballmer, he's done extremely
well for himself, but he can't lead this battle, and hasn't been great at
delegating to people who can. God is in the details. Ballmer can't make them
work.

That a guy who basically got his start licking microsoft's asshole with his
tongue in public thinks it might work doesn't mean much.

