
Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future - raju
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/20/berners_lee_says_facebook_a_thret_to_web/
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RyanMcGreal
Here's where the critique of Facebook gets interesting: we criticize it for
creating a "closed silo of content" in which information is not represented in
open URLs, while simultaneously criticizing it for not providing and enforcing
strong, simple privacy controls.

I'm not being a smartass here: both of these issues concern me - to the point
that I don't have a facebook account - but I'm not sure how to reconcile them
in an internally consistent overarching critique.

~~~
pyre
Huh? It's pretty easy. Give users the proper ability to control what of their
information is and isn't private. That's it.

The situation as it stands now:

* Facebook tries as hard as it can to make it impossible for a user to liberate their information from the system (either to ditch Facebook for a new system, or to run both in parallel).

* Facebook constantly has bugs/oversights/intentional misrepresentations that allow 3rd parties to get access to user information that the user though they had ultimate control over. This information obvious isn't a click-button interface to access, but the people trying to harvest that type of information are more technical (or will just hire more technical people) than the majority Facebook's user-base.

The ultimate goal is give the user control and meet user expectations:

* When a user says, "Hide my email from everyone but my friends," they don't want there to be some way for a 3rd party or a friend of a friend to url-hack their way to that information (even if they don't know what url-hacking even means; don't prey on user ignorance, and claim that you're ethical).

* The user _does_ want the ability to export the information that they have in the system. Don't hide behind some excuse like, "You can't export all of your friends' contact information because that information belongs to your friends." As long as your friends have given you access to see it, then you have access to that information. It's not a privacy violation if you allow a user to export data that they have read-access to. If your friend revokes access to their (e.g.) email address down the road, that doesn't mean that you still don't know what it is. You could have manually entered it into Gmail, or your physical address book. An export feature is just an automation of this process, not a privacy violation.

~~~
joe_the_user
_It's not a privacy violation if you allow a user to export data that they
have read-access to._

That applies more to email addresses than photos.

Of course, you can persuasively argue that users want their friends to have
the right to save their contact information but not necessarily their photos
(after all, contact information is worthless if you can't save it).

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hxa7241
It is not really Facebook particularly, it is a general problem.

There is a deep structural opposition between the internet and the
corporate/commercial model of the last 200 years since the industrial
revolution. With the internet, the essence is connection: in all shapes and
directions. With the corporation, the essence is centralisation: broadcast
product one way, concentrate money the other way.

The 'conical' structure of the corporation can exist in the network structure
of the internet, but the more cone-like it is, the less network-like it is.

~~~
stcredzero
In the late 80's and early 90's, people were talking about the finer grained
capitalism in Japan. Groups inside corporations could develop working
relationships with other groups inside the corporation or with outsourcers.
That's also how it works in the US, but the corporation and divisions within
large corporations act as barriers, making transactions and projects between
such groups awkward.

From what I've seen, todays corporations should act more like a network and
less like a monolithic entity. I've been inside one Fortune 500 company that
tried to set top-down standards for software development. (All ye shall use
this messaging, that database, this webserver, that programming language.)
Everyone knew it was a joke and ignored it until it went away. I've been
inside another corporation where the corporation merely mandated standards for
sharing data between systems. As a result, the dynamic changed from everyone
protecting their turf, to everyone trying to be as useful to as many others as
possible.

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natrius
Here's a list of Berners-Lee's statements that are contradicted by
<http://graph.facebook.com>:

"The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the
information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once
you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on
another site."

"You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one
site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."

"The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI"

Except for email addresses of friends, a third-party site can access as much
of a user's Facebook data as the user wants to make available. Statements to
the contrary are common, but false.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
So there's a site with the main purpose of maintaining a list of contacts and
everything is as openly accessible as users want. Everything but contact
information. That makes no sense to me at all.

There's that completely disingenuous argument that my contacts' privacy would
somehow be violated if I could export my address book. But it was me who they
entrusted with their contact info. If someone shares a phone number with me,
it's for me to decide what to do with it, not for the phone company or the
handset maker, so why is Facebook keeping my address book hostage?

~~~
stanleydrew
It's not keeping it hostage, if you are a Yahoo Mail user. You can export
email addresses there and to Hotmail I think.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I'm neither a yahoo nor a hotmail user.

~~~
stanleydrew
I was being slightly facetious and should have made it more obvious.

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petervandijck
I think the pendulum will swing back to open pretty soon, it kind of feels
we're at the black end of closedness in terms of the social graph.

In fact, a great time to start new companies shooting for the social graph.
Facebook executes fantastically, but they'll stumble.

~~~
moe
I agree.

The headline reads like "Horse-carriage threatening the future of
transportation".

Facebook is merely the latest evolutionary milestone, and it's crackling
already.

There was once a time when AOL and compuserve defined what Joe Sixpack would
have called "the internet" when asked.

It shattered and we entered the era of portals (yahoo, lycos), whose
dominance, again, faded when the first worthwhile search engines came around.

Today we're just seeing the latest cycle in this pattern, the new concept now
being the social graph. And just like before it's at first being beta-tested
and refined in a small number of closed silos (facebook, twitter), simply
because implementation, experimentation and monetization are so much easier in
a closed ecosystem.

Now that the concepts have matured it's a matter of time before the good parts
break out into distributed protocols and services, which will incrementally
erode the monoliths.

Internet evolution at work, nothing to see here, please move along.

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rbarooah
He's wrong about not being able to link to song information on iTunes. That's
been possible for about a year. What's interesting is that presumably this is
because at a certain point (once they had secured the market) Apple found it
more beneficial to expose this information to the web than to keep it behind a
wall.

I wonder this will apply to Facebook too. Perhaps when they're secure enough
to not worry if Google simply sucks out all their data, the benefits of being
the central but open resource will outweigh the benefits of being a one way
valve.

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mgkimsal
"The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the
information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once
you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on
another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others"

This has been pretty much every ecommerce site since the 90s. I didn't hear
anyone clamoring that pets.com, drugstore.com or 1800flowers.com was going to
threaten the future of the web. There's more to it than just that "data is
siloed" issue. Most ecommerce sites don't have a network effect built-in -
they deliver value to me regardless of how many other people use them.

There's the threat of inertia - people won't re-enter their information in to
new systems as those systems are introduced. That's certainly a concern, but I
really don't see it as a threat. AOL was king for years, and people were
scared of them. Then MySpace. Now Facebook. I suspect as people grow up, the
focus may move to something that's not yet developed. Certainly the game is
Facebook's to lose right now, but I don't think they'll hold on forever.

Granted, I think Tim's point is not specifically _facebook_ but the
walled/siloed data sites in general. I also don't think those will ever go
away.

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ankimal
"Cable television companies that sell internet connectivity are considering
whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of
entertainment,"

This is the big one for me and should also include mobile providers. For the
web to promote real innovation and be truly "democratic", this mafia must be
dismantled.

~~~
dedward
I'm just thinking that's unlikely to happen as long as some level of
competition is maintained - nobody is going to put up with a walled-in
internet. As soon as the cable company does this the telco will capitalize on
it like mad, and vice-versa.

I can see a provider provide, say, special content only to users of their
network - but that's a completely different story.

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earnubs
This reminds me of when the .mobi domain was described as a threat to the
future of the web (<http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD>). While Facebook is
much more of a thing than .mobi I'm pretty sure the end result will be the
same, Facebook will come and go, the web will abide.

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webXL
Before Facebook, couldn't I share and receive the same information over email?
What if FB was a desktop email client that just made that really easy to do,
like Flock for email? Would TBL or anyone care about such a silo?

If the value of the web is increasing faster than the value of Facebook, I
think the web will survive... unless FB is deliberately trying to destroy the
web, of course.

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EGreg
Tim berners-lee is absolutely right. We are getting too centralized.

<http://myownstream.com/blog#2010-05-21>

You CAN have privacy and distributed.

