After Facebook, what?
The delicious riddle of Facebook's future is part parlour game, part billion-dollar question. It might just be me, but I'm hearing more grumbling than raving about the site these days. For people who joined earlier in the year, the novelty has worn off. The rush of long-lost acquaintances clamouring for renewed “friendship” has petered out. After all, one can only have gone to grade school with so many people.
There's also the fact that the only thing with tastes more fickle than a teenager is the media. In this corner, anyway, Facebook got so overexposed so quickly that we're getting loath to raise it again, what with readers' groans echoing pre-emptively in our ears.
Facebook moved to forestall ennui by allowing third parties to write add-ons to their service, but so far the most compelling of these add-ons allow people to play online Scrabble with one another and add their pets as friends. So, for many, things have settled into a period of quiet stagnation, in which Facebook's mild diversions weigh off against its mild irritations.
It follows that I'm not just being curmudgeonly to suggest that Facebook's days in the sun are numbered. It's not going to implode any time soon, but the sheen will wear off, and the vanguard of cool kids will seek greener pastures, and the cheerleading media will chase after them as soon as it clues in. But what will those greener pastures look like?
One option is that they will look a lot like Facebook, but with a new name and some appealing innovations – say, maybe some way of structuring “friendships” so that your best friend of decades is not given the same status as your Grade 9 nemesis.
But a site like that would share the same Achilles heel that Facebook shares with Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, and all the other social networks that came before it. To use your Facebook account, you first have to log into Facebook. Everything you do there is transacted in Facebook's private la-la land. Facebook news, Facebook mail, Facebook friends. It's a Web within the Web, a world unto its own, something they call a “walled garden” website.
What's the downside to a walled garden? For one thing, it faces users with a my-way-or-the-highway decision. If you want to talk to friends on Facebook, you need a Facebook account. That's fine and dandy so long as everyone is using Facebook. But, as per the immutable laws of ennui, it seems unlikely that everyone will stay there forever. You can't add people who use MySpace to a Facebook account, and so on. Nor is that list of friends you've built up any good for any application outside of the Facebook universe.
The whole thing reminds me of a behemoth of yesteryear. Remember America Online? In the early nineties, its private network offered subscribers a fun, easy-to-use online experience before the Web as we know it even existed. You could point-and-click your way through discussion forums and live chats. You could even find pictures of Marilyn Monroe in various states of undress. I remember this specifically, because I was 12, and it was momentous.
America Online was able to leapfrog existing services by using its own private technology on its own private network; standards of the day were clunky and text-based. But in the end, it couldn't keep up with a peculiar open network that crept up from behind: the World Wide Web.
You didn't have to subscribe to services from any one company to access the Web. Instead, you could use any Web browser on any computer, because they all spoke the same language. You usually had to pay someone for access, but you weren't bound to them. As the Web grew and diversified, AOL's walled garden became less and less fragrant.
AOL's glory days are long gone. Today, it's a big corporate Internet service provider like any other, driving users towards a big, dumb, mass-market website. (Current top headline: “Crunchy Twist on Chicken Salad!”) Facebook today is like the AOL of 15 years ago. It's big, it's on top of its game, and it doesn't play nicely with others. But imagine if it did.
Right now, Facebook and its competitors own their users' lists of friends. To access your network, you have to log into Facebook. But what if that list of relationships didn't belong exclusively to Facebook? What if your friend's list lived out on the Internet, and could be used by any authorized website or application?
For instance, that same network of friends might pop up in Microsoft Word, where you could call on people to collaborate on documents. Your contacts would be available on the Web-surfing smartphones we're all about to have foisted upon us. It would power your instant-messaging chat, the list of people who can see your private Flickr album, and on, and on.
An open standard would let users access the same universal social network through whichever service they like. Facebook and its brethren would be left looking like gated suburbs next to thriving neighbourhoods.
The nerd in me wants to see it happen, even though the fact remains that it's easier to make money from a closed system, at least in the near term. But if an open standard liberated networks of friends from the clutches of their chosen social networking site, a plethora of possibilities would emerge.
So, back to where we started. After Facebook, what? Personally, I'm hoping for the deluge.
