I agree that from a resource perspective, it’s a good idea to focus on what you do best first but I think the value of facebook simply as a way to tell me how my friends from high school are doing is a very severe limitation of the potential here. There’s more to friend oriented social networks than that.

One area where twitter clearly beats facebook out (on the friendships front) is in discovering new friends. I meet more people I want to “follow” on twitter simply because their implicit, ad-hoc social graphs end up leading me to them.

I don’t personally think facebook is wining any efforts to be the closed network du jour. if we see more technologies like web-finger, js-kit echo and the wave federation protocol adopted by content sources, there will be a forcing function towards a more federated social networking world.

*shrug* I guess fundamentally I don’t believe that links are content that can be locked in a proprietary way. the nodes in the graph will live where they want, the arcs will not be controlled.

I understand the temptation of FB and others to branch into areas they aren’t currently in, but I would remind everyone of the strong value of knowing what you’re good at and getting better at it - because the world of FB at 200mln users is so different than the world of FB at 10mln users… and its more important to get that right than to figure out how to kill twitter (or linkedin, or… )

I am glad we can disagree in a civilized manner. I see your points, and I somewhat agree with them, but still have concerns about having a sandbox only to test the semantic world (yes, a large sandbox indeed).

Besides, the biggest problem I see is that facebook is setup for friends (as you agreed in your text - ok, somewhat :)) not for business. there is a clear delineation in each community on the purpose which is controlled by the community. as long as the community can control the onslaught of business, then we will be fine. if they cannot control it, that is when communities die.

i think there are a couple of things that facebook could do to encourage biz and personal to merge in the same network - probably the most important would be to allow users to create separate personas and sub-communities to manage as they please (if i don’t want biz to get access to my personal community and or information, i should be able to manage that). they are not doing that today, but that would make their network become a de-facto for both personal and biz (it si somewhat for personal today). if i could use each group as a sub-community (there was talk of that about a month ago, then it died) then I am 1,000% in agreement of using facebook for biz.

until then, we will just continue to disagree (slightly) on how and when to use it.

thanks for the wonderful conversation and the platform.

Facebook significantly differs from any of the earlier walled gardens for a few important reasons.
1. Open platform. By aggressively opening up via APIs, platform, and most recently Facebook Connect, Facebook preempted a lot of potential frustration and competition by giving people “just enough” access to data in what is really a proprietary network. Effectively, Facebook is allowing and encouraging openness while retaining control. I think of Facebook like Singapore, which provides limited freedom within bounds but behind the scenes is a benevolent dictatorship which generally makes pretty good decisions on behalf of its people.

2. Trusted identity. Sociology research shows that all else equal, real-world relationships last longer than virtual-only relationships. Facebook was built around real offline networks like schools and employers, and unlike MySpace or SecondLife created a norm of only initiating and accepting friend requests from people you actually know. MySpace and other social networking sites have failed because you didn’t actually know your connections.

3. Strict opt-in nature. Facebook and Twitter are 100% opt-in. If you’re sick of hearing from a brand, you can hide their updates, unfan, or unfollow. Yes, Facebook and Twitter are giving brands new tools to reach individuals, but the key difference to keep in mind is that individuals can always opt out. There are no marketing lists and spamming allowed. Facebook also built in strict privacy controls to let individuals choose exactly what information they want to share with whom, including whether they want to allow someone who isn’t a friend to message them, add them as a friend, or even see them in a search result.

At their peak, AOL, Compuserve, and Second Life never broke past 30 million users. MySpace had 125M last time I checked, but Facebook has lapped them.

Which is not to say that Facebook is invincible (no one is), but I it does mean it may have much greater staying power, as evidenced by its continued remarkable growth and people’s willingness to forgive what I agree have been some big mistakes - privacy concerns around first newsfeed and then Beacon, content ownership, and platform ToS. Certainly Facebook needs to learn from these mistakes in order to continue being successful.

In principle, I, like you, want the semantic web to be 100% free and open versus on a proprietary network. The reality is the web has become the wild west, and people are flocking to order and to what they trust. They trust friends, and so far Facebook has done the best job of organizing people’s friends. Philosophically, I am still gunning for open standards to win in the long term for both the social web and semantic web, but it hasn’t been looking good so far.

Thanks for this fun intellectual debate.

I think there are two parts to this post, and both are equally important.

As a passionate supporter and patient advocate of semantically connecting entities, I am totally and violently in agreement with the first part. The ability to add metadata to a relationship (where the metadata complements the implicit knowledge of the relationship) between entities certainly begins to build the semantic web. We still have the issue of assuming that entities are properly built and described — but this is a huge first step.

The use of Facebook as a private network where to deploy this — not so sure.

My perspective: each community is built or transforms into a specific purpose. My second life is a community for gamers-like who want to connect and relate aside from the real world. MySpace is a place where musicians can exchange exposure and fans. Facebook is a place where friends can stay notified about each other, and share photos.

None of them had as a purpose for brands to know who is related to whom, or for marketers to learn whether we are more like Beethoven or Bach. You probably noticed the slow death of second-life once marketers took over, and MySpace suffered a similar fate (between commercialization and spammers).

Facebook had its first backslash once people began to figure out what was involved in using all those funny apps - the loss of privacy and the intrusion of marketers into the relationships that users held pretty dear.

Further, focusing on a specific private network to release a semantic tool is wrong not only because of the intrusion into the community member’s privacy and trust, but also because unless we end up all using facebook as the only network for everything we do - you are collecting a adding value to data in a place where usage is limited at best. If you cannot take those semantic implications out of facebook and use them in real life (say, like merge them with Goggle’s metadata about users and pages and pictures, etc.) then the very limited value it has will decrease as the network begins to decay (all communities suffer that fate, remember the Well? Compurserve? AOL? can you imagine the amount of knowledge lost with each one?)

I would totally applaud facebook as having done the correct thing if they would have figured out a way to apply those semantics to the entire web. As it is, I see it as another step towards its demise since it will alienate users that are not comfortable or in agreement withe the “new way of working”.

Cheers to you on continuing the trailblazing/pioneering! GREAT article/post that is MUCH needed b/c of al the “non-techies” still learning about the importance of social media, especially FB, and their power.

In sharing this “non-techie” reference I invite you to reflect on/explore all the millions of people that are these “non-techies” that will not even be able to understand/grasp the “awkwardness” you shared your associate Charlie pointed out as they are still embracing the basic learning curve(s) with FB and not yet at even knowing/understanding the “awkwardness…”

This understanding/grasp/even noticing it is reserved for the techies like you/Charlie/your other alliances! This is why we need your “trailblazing/pioneering” b/c you so eloquently help others embrace up-to-the-minute-current events like the unparalleled “@-referencing post” you had posted whithin hours of the global buzz about this awesome feature! Thank you…….

Cheering you/your continued success on…..Steph~