Comments on: Facebook – The Wal-Mart of the internet

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:49:56 +0000

I reckon it’s all to do with their IPO and a need to generate more income.

What I’d like to see is a next-generation social network that isn’t based around silos, but around a decentralised ecosystem of applications communicating with each other using protocols like RSS.

By: Chuk

Chuk — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 19:29:38 +0000

I wonder if that was their plan all along, or if someone came up with this relatively recently? Also, will it happen to Google+?
We’re going to have to go back to individually run listservs or newsgroups.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:56:37 +0000

The lack of export or archiving (by design, it appears) is another aspect of Facebook's silo-like nature that I haven't considered. They want to lock users in to their site.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 03:04:05 +0000

One other community I participate in used an email listserv for many years of its existence. After opening a Facebook page (in big part to bring in people who didn’t use anything but Facebook) the listserv all but vanished. It’s still running, but barely anyone posts to it anymore.

The problem with FB is that in some ways it’s terribly useful — it gives you a single point of reference for things that most everyone understands. But I lay no bets on how long that will last, or what it will cost. (Forget trying to export a conversation, let alone the history for a whole group — hell, even swipe-and-paste from a conversation doesn’t work half the time.)