There have been many “best things” since sliced bread. A Beatles Album from the early 1960’s triumphantly stated on the back cover “This album is recorded in stereophonic sound. It can never become obsolete!” (Actually all the voices sang down one ear and all the instruments played down the other - weird to listen to - perhaps they were right - it would be great for Karaoke).
But what about Facebook? We’ve joined the network – we’ve now even seen the film. Is there anything now stopping us wearing the T-shirt? One in every eight minutes spent online is spent on Facebook. Godman Sachs tells us it is worth $55 billion plus, and when Mark Zuckerberg says that Social Networking should not just be part of our web experience, but the experience itself, is he wrong? Facebook now allows you to host entire websites from within your Fan Pages (see an example) implying you need never leave the social network to browse the sites you want to. And with social reputation deciding “Good” versus “Bad” websites, these networks are potentially far more powerful a marketing force than Google’s search ranking algorithm – so subject to automated exploitation of whatever the next key “ranking factor” happens to be. The prospect of Social Networking as the experience of the web is a compelling one.
But will it be Facebook? Not if we predict for Social Networking the constant ebb and flow of Centralising Vs Decentralising forces that have so shaped computing power over its 5 decades of life. If we do so, we can see that the “Face”, is in need of considerable plastic surgery if it is to continue to "fit".
The first wave of computer evolution saw mainframes (centralised, monolithic processors of the 1970s) begin to share processing capability with "dumb terminals" (where processing power remained central, but input and output of data could be performed remotely by the 1980s). This decentralisation continued with the rise of powerful PCs, culminating in the fully “cooperative” processing of the mid 1990s between rich (“FAT”) applications on PCs communicating in real-time with mainframe backends (Client Server).
With the advent of the Internet and almost simultaneous availability of virtual technologies (such as Citrix) in the late 1990s, the second wave of centralised processing began to crest, as functional capability slowly leached away from the PC back into the “cloud” of the internet and central server farms and PCs once again became increasingly “THIN”. Indeed the most extreme expression of this can be seen nowadays with the rise of mobile and tablet computing which truly represent modern “dumb terminals” reacting principally to centrally stored and processed data, content and function.
The Centralised model applies to the first generation of Social Networks, of which Facebook represents the pinnacle. These networks are centralised to the extent you log into them, give them all your details and friends, and you can then only access their networking facilities in the way that they make available to you. Each network consequently has a unique “behaviour” and way of interacting, but you follow it. This therefore also defines the sort of messages we send and the sort of people we interact with on each network.
The drawback is that consequently, people have different social networks for different purposes. You use LinkedIn for professional interactions; Facebook for more social – “water cooler” type chat; Twitter for headlines. In this sense Social networks currently treat us - as well as our networks - as multiple different people. And this is what will kill the first generation of Social Networks.
All current Social Networks are closed, centralised systems. You can’t even share the services of other networks that do integrate with your preferred network (e.g. Twitter posting to LinkedIn) without signing the terms and conditions of that other service and having a fully-signed-up network of people over on the other side. And the services then don’t really "interact" even under this level of integration.
What will topple Facebook?
The challenge is for a service provider to define a social networking architecture that treats YOU as the individual (one profile, one set of interests, bio, pictures, one defined network of acquaintances, etc) and allows you to co-opt the services of any network in the way you prefer. Anyone accessing you via any of their preferred networks, gets a consistent a view of your profile and network across whichever channel they access you from (obviously within any constraints you choose to set up). This would be a distributed and “open” Social Network architecture: where YOU hold the your data and friendships in one place and the networks link you up in the way you wish.
How?
The closest commercial model to this vision actually sits with Google. Admittedly requiring you to sign up to their Ts & Cs, every Google function beyond that point is free, modular and totally open to the rest of the world via published application interfaces. YouTube, and Blogger (both Google applications) sit at positions 3 & 4 respectively behind Google (1) and Facebook (2) as the worlds top-most visited websites.
Facebook is not even a contender for some of the facilities in which Google is in the top position on the web (e.g. Facebook is not a player in Video or eMail – not to mention Search – which is very poor on Facebook).
What Google currently lacks on the other hand is that gravitational pull that will allow people to Socialise across all the Google utilities - which even now really behave as stand-alone apps. There is also not yet the architecture that allows anyone to link-in their (approved) applets into that framework.
But if you look at Microsoft’s current acquisition of Skype (see my views on this) you will understand that Microsoft see their greatest opportunity in emulating what Google is doing, not in what Facebook is.
The challenge to Facebook is to its centralised model and monolithic nature. The distributed model above is a vision, but nobody is there yet.
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