

Boycott the Button (Facebook Connect) - jrlevine
http://blog.jakerlevine.com/post/366422034/boycott-the-button-why-i-refuse-to-click-on-facebook
It’s getting a little scary. I’m at the point where I would rather spend 5 minutes filling out a new profile than log into a third party site using Facebook Connect. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook Connect is a great tool (for Facebook) and I appreciate the gesture of interoperability, but I can’t help but see it as the single greatest threat to the future of the social web.
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ZachPruckowski
I don't see the issue here. Anyone who beats Facebook is going to have to
offer nearly all of Facebook's features and some killer-app features of its
own. So any Facebook-killer will make it similarly easy to integrate a
FBKiller-Connect feature.

And the ramp up of any Facebook-Killer is going to be months or years. In that
intervening few years, people will be dual-networked: they'll be using the new
network with their friends who have the new network, and they'll be using
Facebook for the friends that haven't switched or for legacy features
(Farmville), sort of like now, where many people have both a Facebook and a
MySpace.

And given the existing fundamental lock-in of the network effects, I don't
think Facebook Connect is the largest hurdle someone plotting a Facebook-
Killer has to overcome.

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dasil003
_Anyone who beats Facebook is going to have to offer nearly all of Facebook's
features and some killer-app features of its own. So any Facebook-killer will
make it similarly easy to integrate a FBKiller-Connect feature._

Examples of this? Mature market leaders are not usually unseated by someone
out-doing what they do best. They get blindsided by new approaches or market
shifts. No one is going to out-Facebook Facebook, their engineering operations
are truly truly amazing. The agility they demonstrate at that scale is mind-
blowing, making Google's operations look easy by comparison. That doesn't mean
they are invulnerable, just that a head-on attack isn't likely to succeed.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
Mature Market leaders don't usually have the network effect lock-ins that
Facebook has. In a traditional market, I'll swap to the new Product (Product
X) as long as Product X does a decent job on the features I use in the
original product and something new that makes it better for me.

The problem is that a Facebook-Killer has to be able to attract everyone at
once, because of the network effects. It can't just be better than Facebook
for me, it has to be better than Facebook for most of my friends (who use
completely different subsets of the Facebook features), because I'm not
switching unless they do. The end result is that the Facebook-Killer, in order
to build its network effects, has to have replicated features and new features
that make it better than Facebook for a large segment of the population.

A traditional app-killer can duplicate the most used 40-50% of the App's
features and toss in a new revolutionary feature, and it'll take off (since
most people don't use App's features that AppKiller didn't implement).
However, Facebook is like Word - most people only use 20% of the features, but
everyone uses a different 20%. So if you want to grab even a third of
Facebook's users, you have to re-implement 60% or more of Facebook's features
in addition to your killer features.

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dasil003
The network effect only reinforces my point, I fail to see what you're getting
at.

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jasonlotito
The Facebook Connect button at the bottom of this post was the best part.

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jrlevine
I'd like to say it was broken on purpose to make my point...clearly I make a
poor revolutionary. (Updated to include OpenID and Twitter)

~~~
jasonlotito
I'm bad a replying to comments. There are far too many places I comment.
Google Wave needs to hurry up and get released!

Anyways, I didn't even check. I just saw it, and it was highly amusing.

I should also point out that I didn't say you were wrong. =) It really was
just very, very amusing in light of the post.

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thafman
Some battles have a winner, publishers are no more likely to stop adopting FB
connect then they are to start inserting robots no-follow.

Google won the (general) search battle and it's nigh impossible for a young
innovative start-up to beat them. Facebook are beginning to assume Google-
esque dominance, and no start-up looks at all likely to displace them.

In the end ease of use wins every time.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
Of course, someone would have said the same thing about IBM a few decades ago,
or Internet Explorer 8-10 years ago. And they were saying it about Yahoo and
Altavista and MySpace before Facebook and Google came along.

~~~
Pahalial
Sure. And they did say those things. And the sites that genuinely cared about
user needs, both past and present? They did the 'inefficient' thing. They
optimized for whatever was best-of-breed at the time (IE, FBConnect) for ease
of use, then found a way to also cater to whatever came up next. Many
headaches were caused by IE/Firefox incompatibility, but Firefox is still
gaining marketshare today.

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micrypt
Reminds me of Chris Messina's talk “Identity is the Platform”.

[http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/10/01/video-of-my-talk-
ident...](http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/10/01/video-of-my-talk-identity-is-
the-platform/)

