Google, MySpace and Facebook are digging in for what is shaping up to be a serious fight over who controls a user’s data. MySpace and Facebook, both storage facilities for social network data have entrenched interests in maintaing as close to total control as their users can tolerate.
While they recognize total closure of their walled garden will alienate users they do so grudgingly. A majority of Facebook users haven’t quite realize how angry they are because secondary disruptive services haven’t hit the market in a big way - most social network apps obligingly play by the various rules established by the social networks.
Facebook in particular is angling their control of users’ data as ensuring privacy. This is a patent, bald face lie. They aren’t interested in user privacy, they’re interested in not pissing the users off, these are very different things. If they can quietly and obsequously hand-off information to trust worthy high-biddiners they will. The hubris of Facebook in not permitting users to do with their data what they wish will very likely prove to be their undoing if they don’t seek to remedy the situation and engage portability in a big way.
It seems like Microsoft has got more than a financial stake in Facebook - Zuckerberg has inherited Gatesian tactics with regards to grassroots tech movements - screw those unwashed users, I’ve got a vision and a business to realize here!
Google has realized, wisely, several things. Firstly, it hasn’t convinced itself that Orkut can compete on the social networking scene in the US with Facebook and MySpace - so it has instead put itself in the middle of the social data providers and the social data users - not surprisingly, Google leads THIS pack as well, YouTube & AdSense stand to gain more from data portability than Facebook or MySpace can squeeze out of their walled garden. Not to mention Google Office etc.
Google’s Friend Connect should be seen as a slap in the Facebook, FB reaction - that is to shut-out access to Google is a proverbial kick in the balls to the user. They’re taking out their frustration with a smarter, larger and more competive adversary on their users.
Michael Arrington wrote about it on TechCrunch and the increasingly questionable Robert Scoble, of course, weighed in. Arrington poigniently challenged, “How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data!” That is the underlying point. Google wants users to hand off their social data to lots of services, Facebook only wants those who profit it directly.
As a game theorist, this is a hands-down win-win for Google. Either Facebook raises the ante by closing the doors while Google ramps the demand for socially networked apps by building a platform of tools to set Facebook users salivating and ranting at their admins, or Facebook opens up and Google can profit from the data availability. It seems Google knows Facebook better than Facebook does - as demonstrated by the nullifying effect of OpenSocial API on the Microsoft investment announcement.
Obviously this is theoretical, there simply aren’t enough broad-use socially networked applications to make availability of them a decisive issue. Most MySpace Facebook users are behind the alpha-geek curve - Plaxo etc just aren’t in their vocabulary yet; the modal age for the userbase being no small factor.