

The Great Wall of Facebook - jncraton
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/ff_facebookwall?currentPage=all

======
Locke1689
The difference between Google and Facebook for me: I trust Google (to a
certain extent). I trust Facebook in no way. Google's policies have generally
showed that they're concerned about privacy and their targeted ads produce
information relevant to you, without sharing it with the advertisers. I'm
confident that if I give Google my email service, they won't sell my email
address to spammers or any of the info in my emails unless forced, etc, etc.

Facebook has never shown itself to be trustworthy. They continually try and
control their users data. They made it extremely difficult to delete an
account before. Most of their ad providers seems sleazy and trying to trick
you. Their stupid 3rd party apps get who knows how much access to your
profile, completely unregulated by Facebook. Not to mention them secretly
changing terms of service and the like.

I _feel_ comfortable with Google. I never _feel_ comfortable with Facebook.

~~~
gaius
_They made it extremely difficult to delete an account before._

That's an interesting point. How you ever tried to delete your search history
at Google? One of the main differences between the two that I see is that
everything Facebook knows about you, you have to explicitly tell it. Google
quietly logs everything you search for and you don't even notice.

~~~
thwarted
Deleting your search history at Google is like three clicks (Web History |
Remove Items | Clear entire Web History ) -- however, I've never done this,
since I like being able to browse my search history. Now, of course, Google
could be keeping the data around even though you've elected to delete it, or
may be attempting to anonymize it to use it for a different purpose, but
that's another issue.

~~~
gaius
Yeah I've seen this - but the EU's dispute with Google is that they keep
history for 2 years regardless, so that implies that clearing your history is
merely cosmetic.

~~~
thwarted
That implication neither confirms nor denies the "difficulty" of deleting your
search history; three clicks means it's as difficult to delete your search
history as it is to move a file to the recycle bin in Windows and empty it.
Fact is, you can't confirm that it gets deleted, whatever that exactly means,
no matter what the UI is, but that has nothing to do with the ease of finding
or using the delete functionality.

However, does the fact that a cosmetic delete function exists say that Google
wants to allow you to actually delete something or just wants you to think
that you are deleting something, and is this better or worse than Facebook,
which doesn't even have a cosmetic interface to do so, other than perhaps
removing your account all together, and has established and known TOS that say
they can do whatever they want with the data you give them?

------
iamelgringo
I suppose that I'm kind of an old fart, because Facebook reminds me powerfully
of AOL. They are both walled gardens.

While at one point AOL was powerful and rich enough to purchase Time Warner.
AOL still hangs on, a shell of what it once was. The main difference, is that
AOL had a clear monetization strategy: it charged its users for access. And,
it made craploads of money because it simplified computers and getting online
for millions of people.

Facebook does a similar thing. It allows people to do interesting things with
their computers without having to worry about the dark and scary bits of the
internet.

Us older people remember the devastation that occured when AOL unlocked the
gate it's walled garden to let people access the internet at large. It's know
as the eternal September. Finally, when AOL's users got tech savvy enough to
use the wild internet without AOL's hand holding, they left in droves.

I suspect similar things are going to happen to Facebook users. I could be
wrong.

~~~
natrius
Some call it a walled garden; some call it privacy settings. I hear the
"walled garden" criticism all the time, but I've never really understood it.
What would make Facebook not a walled garden to you, while still giving users
control of what information they want to share with which people?

------
Husafan
Another obstacle I think Facebook will eventually run into is the fact that
social graphs, to me at least, seem fairly static. I am not a celebrity, and
for me, literally ALL of my Facebook friends are people I know in real life.

While it is interesting to learn new tidbits of information about them, I am
also very aware of the fact that, for instance, none of them live in Mountain
View. If I decided I wanted to move there, the first thing I would do is turn
to Google to learn about real-estate, utilities, getting a driver's license,
etc. I don't quite see how placing the constraints of a social graph on top of
a search for unknown information will make that search more useful. When
stepping into uncharted territory, I don't want artificial limitations on what
I find.

~~~
Periodic
One of the odd things about the social graphs for me is that I have multiple
distinct social graphs that overlap little if at all. I expect there are many
people that want to really be sure they are keeping their work, personal, and
family lives separate.

For example, my high school friends probably hate my updates about programming
and computer topics. And honestly I don't care much about their trip to the
river.

On the other hand, my more professional friends (who I don't interact with on
twitter) could care less that I'm walking the dog but are happy to chat about
programming.

For that reason I have multiple communities: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HN.
They each have different social graphs and I discuss different things with
each of them. Facebook's is trying to connect to these other sites to connect
usernames to Facebook profiles, but I'm not sure I want all that going back to
the same place.

------
wallflower
Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on the ambitions of Facebook.

"Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the
social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

[http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-
list...](http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-listened-and-
why-it-definitely-wont-start-now/)

~~~
CodeMage
Interesting read. However, there's one reason why Facebook and similar social
networking applications fail for me, and I'm wondering just how many (or how
few) people have the same problem. Consider Scoble's words:

 _You pull out your iPhone or Palm Pre or Android or Blackberry or Windows
Mobile doohickey and click open the Facebook application. Then you type "sushi
near me."

It answers back "within walking distance are two sushi restaurants that more
than 20 of your friends have liked."_

So far, there hasn't been a single social app I tried that managed to give me
useful information like that. Why? Because they don't offer me a good way to
differentiate and they don't learn. For these apps, all contacts in my network
are the same and there's no way to teach them otherwise. On Facebook, I'm
"friends" with:

1) People I see daily at work and we're friendly to each other.

2) People I've met in the past few years and we've been friendly back then but
now were out of touch.

3) People from my ground school and high school, whom I haven't seen in more
than 20 years.

4) A few relatives.

5) A few people with whom I have a lasting friendship.

Depending on what kind of "friend" my contact is, I would treat their
recommendations of sushi restaurants differently. The same thing happens to me
on the Goodreads site. I've found many great books there, but every time I had
to search for hours.

I suppose it's just a matter of time before someone finally does it right, but
I just wanted to point out what I find to be missing. And I'm really wondering
whether other people feel the same or I'm just too damn picky...

~~~
inerte
I don't know if Facebook has this feature (probably), but on Orkut you can
assign friends to Groups, like Family, Co-Workers, Best Friends, etc...

It would probably solve your problem if an option to "Only consider the
opinion of these Groups" were present. Of course, we'll fall into the problem
of how noteworthy their opinions are depending on the subject. While I would
trust my middle brother expertise on digital cameras, the youngest in the
house is a chef, so each one should weight differently.

Something so complete will never happen (never is a dangerous word), because
that would require other people to constantly input information like "I trust
Gustavo's opinion on digital cameras", and even that isn't enough, because my
brother is a professional photographer, and isn't the best person to ask if
you want a cheap camera.

So, I don't think any of these "other people you know liked XYZ" will manage
to give you things that you'll probably like (I enjoy different types of
japanese food than my brother, for example), but they will help you socialize
more. You'll at least know that your friend went to some restaurant, and tell
him later about your experience.

------
azharcs
What I really find interesting in this article is how some of the Facebookers
are already considering Google as a Big Brother of Online world and in most
cases, It is. I think Google is to Today's startups what IBM was to 70's &
80's Startups and Microsoft was to 90's Startups, a Gigantic and Monopolistic
enemy to fight against.

 _they(Google) don't think Facebook's staff has the brainpower to succeed
where they have failed. "If they found a way to monetize all of a sudden,
sure, that would be a problem," says one highly placed Google executive. "But
they're not going to."_

This is the same kind of Arrogant and cocky attitude which made IBM irrelevant
in PC market, Microsoft irrelevant in Online market and Maybe Google in
Advertising. History repeats Itself every decade, atleast in Technology.

~~~
carbon8
_"Google is to Today's startups what IBM was to 70's & 80's Startups and
Microsoft was to 90's Startups, a Gigantic and Monopolistic enemy to fight
against."_

That argument makes no sense, _especially_ in comparison to facebook. Google
is a set of disconnected services that you can take or leave. You don't like
google search or gmail or google maps or google news? Go ahead and use
something else. For any service that doesn't require immediate
personalization, you don't even need to sign up ever. Even if every single
person you interact with uses google search or gmail, it doesn't matter
because you have no obligation to use it. As a developer, if you hate google
and don't want to use anything by the company all you have to think about is
SEO, most of which is basically common sense and regular marketing on non-
google sites. Why would you possibly even need to consider "fight[ing]
against" google unless you were directly competing?

In contrast, Facebook explicitly wants to be THE monolithic dominating force
on the internet. You can't even use it without signing up and joining the
whole Facebook thing. If everyone you know is using it, you end up missing
out; it's basically vendor lock-in for your entire social life. And as a
developer, interacting with Facebook in any meaningful way means dealing with
Facebook every step of the way.

Monolithic platforms like Facebook are truly awful. Facebook is defined by
locking people into the platform while Google joins together disparate web
services and competes on quality and brand recognition. Google has its
problems, but Facebook's problems are right at the core of everything it does.

~~~
RK
_Facebook explicitly wants to be THE monolithic dominating force on the
internet. You can't even use it without signing up and joining the whole
Facebook thing._

It is the new AOL.

I'm still waiting for the "Internet" of social networking sites to come along
and make Facebook, MySpace, etc. things of the proprietary past.

------
ziadbc
"Nobody has the data we have." is somewhat hyperbole. Gmail has more info
about me than Facebook will anytime soon. I am confident that Facebook will
build a great business. However, this article read like something cooked up by
PR firm wanting to paint Facebook vs Google as the next Apple vs. IBM. It's a
half baked analogy at best.

~~~
dant
I agree. Facebook's data on me is not of a particularly good quality. Most of
my "friends" are former colleagues or school friends. I wouldn't trust any of
them to recommend a restarunt any more then I would trust 300 anonymous
reviews on an independant restarunt listings site.

------
sachinag
I don't think I've ever seen Facebook go after Google so aggressively before -
the "surveillance society" language actually made me whistle under my breath.

~~~
brown9-2
I thought that some of the potshots that Facebook engineers took at Google
engineers sounded a bit radical, not to mention just... rude.

I'm sure that Facebook works on and solves some interesting problems, but to
act like what they do is harder than what Google has accomplished? C'mon now.

I've yet to read an article about Facebook in which Zuckerberg doesn't come
off like a jerk

------
johnnybgoode
I'm not a big fan of either of these companies, so I find myself agreeing with
the criticisms from both sides. In today's environment, advertising can
obviously be tremendously profitable, and advertising is what the businesses
of both Facebook and Google boil down to. But the idea of pushing more and
more largely useless crap on people doesn't really interest me, even if it's
profitable. (But then, what most people do on Facebook all day doesn't really
interest me, either.)

------
dsil
One thing I'd never heard before: at least 9 percent of facebook's staff used
to work for google

------
hans
Wouldn't it be nice if the need for a centralized, advertising-driven web
business were removed from our social graph(s)? It would not take much for a
distributed, node based plugin system to house personal sites and friends
lists etc. Then we wouldn't feel so constrained by one monolithic corporation
that inherently is going to have pressures concerning business revenue,
government influence, executive dynasty, et al. My guess is long term we will
take ownership of ourselves back.

~~~
jodrellblank
_It would not take much for a distributed, node based plugin system to house
personal sites and friends lists etc._

Do you know, I think Opera might agree with you here. Except now they've
started it, everyone's laughing at them.

------
krav
Regardless of their ambitions, it's fun for me to see companies in different
verticals go after each other. That's where interesting innovation can happen.
This is far better to read than another "Google search-engine killer."

------
diN0bot
wait, if facebook becomes the internet, will i be marginalized for not having
any friends?

