Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg
OK dude - you’ve had your moment at TC40, the Allen and company scene, magazine covers, gotten lots of growth going on, stealing folks from Google, true leadership and all sorts of stratospheric valuations projected.
You’ve got everyone’s attention, turned down Yahoo, you’re making your VCs very happy, we now know who your sister is and you have all sorts of adoring developers - who will laud you and call you “the web”. You even have the tech equivalent of groupies, which I personally witnessed as they pushed me aside as they clamored to fawn all over you!
But there are still some folks who are concerned that you may think that you own the social graph of your users. That you’re just a lock-in strategy in ‘platform clothing’.
As I told you when I met you at the iLike party - you’ve gone 98% of the way there. You’ve single handedly changed our industry, redefined platforms and created an ecosystem, complete with TWO VC funds now. Congrats dude.
But as David Recordan warned you - what happens when Google starts gunning for you and they go that extra 1% or 2% of the way - that you haven’t gone?
I’m sure you know that Friendster and MySpace came before you and that this game ain’t over with yet!
So:
- check out our Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
- while you’re at it - check out Wasabe’s BoR as well
- check out what David Recordan has to say
- and PLEASE change your TOS, and let us have full access (via APIs) to the News Feeds, friends lists and every bit of user’s data - which is THEiR data - not YOuRS!
- and please - also give us the ability to spit back user data into Facebook, not just suck it out!
My dealings with Dave Morin have been fantastic. You need a company full of righteous dudes like him! But apparently your bizdev people are singing a different song than Dave is. This is what prompted Joseph Smarr to come to me to write up our BoR. This split personality syndrome is typical of hyper growth startups - so I don’t blame you for that.
Folks have talked about having press conferences out in front of your offices - to complain. I tell them “give them time. Everything takes time!”
You’re the boss so just make sure to “do the right thing“. You get all the credit and all the blame. Think of Spike Lee and not Bill Gates.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Facebook would become a billion percent more interesting if they became the identity system everyone could build apps on, with the user’s permission of course. It should just be a checkbox. I want to let Amazon user my Facebook identity. Or I want to let American Airlines use my Facebook identity. Become the API the Internet never had — identity. Then rename the company to HolyGrailBook and change MZ’s title to The Pope of the Internet.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Or maybe the Pope would rename himself the Zuckerberg of the Catholic Church.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
It’d be great if he did open up this information, but as someone who would be rolling out a service that would use it, I’m a little hesitant to trust a company that has been so closed until now. Can we trust them to continue to offer a service like that? How do I tell my investors that it is “OK” to rely on a service that could go away at any time. (I know it’s not that simple, but I’m yet to meet an investor over here that goes beyond the bottom line).
Apart from that concern, viva Open Friends Format! I’d use it in a flash.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
If FB doesn’t listen, a company like LinkedIn might. True that FB has a huge headstart over LinkedIn (and Google, for that matter) … but, so did that OTHER fantastic, high-buzz, “closed” platform…
AOL, anyone?
September 19th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Well, the cat’s already partly out of the bag. I managed to get an RDF file listing all my friends out of Facebook thanks to the new FOAF exporter. Now I just need everyone else to (be able to) do the same thing.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Bottom line is FB needs to grow revenues quickly if they want to go public and ad revenue is the only to do that in this environment. That means keeping users on the site for more time, not sending them to other sites.
Its one thing to say that an individual user should be able to export data, its another to say that a site should provide an API to suck AGGREGATE DATA out of its system. That is very suspect given the amount of crap sites and scammers out there who would immediately use such open data to slap adsense ads on spammy pages.
Also…I don’t think FB users are really clamoring for this feature. Remembering name & pw for multiple websites just isn’t that hard.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
[…] the rest of this great post here […]
September 19th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
[…] Marc Canter’s taking the “Bill of Rights” dialogue one step further, with an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg. Go, Marc, […]
September 19th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Totally agree with Dave Winer. FB has the chance to be the identity holder of the internet. That’s something the stock market will value EVEN if they go public (and I’m not yet sold they will). I would buy the shares of a company in that position even if their cash flow projections were negative for 5 years. It’s just like buying Google before AdSense, there’s no way they won’t make money.
September 19th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I’d like someone to explain why Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IAC, etc. would ever let FB (or anyone else) “pull a DOS” on them by owning identity. We all know that is NOT going to happen.
Also, note that Zuckerberg specifically stated in the TC interview that FB is focused on modeling real-life relationships. They are NOT trying to be your personal identity manager for discusion boards, other SNs, etc.
September 19th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
That’s a dubious statement. I couldn’t use all the websites I’m using without a password manager.
But the main point is not my identity (i.e. what node in the social graph I am), but the edges of that graph. I don’t want to maintain my friends in LinkedIn, Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter and bajillion other apps. I’m *really* tired of it, and so are many of the more active crowd.
Does it apply to the average FB user? Not yet. But at some point, the average user will use more than 5-10 web services, and suddenly identity and connections are really important.
September 19th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
[…] Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Open letter to Mark Zukerberg But as David Recordan warned you - what happens when Google starts gunning for you and they go that extra 1% or 2% of the way - that you haven’t gone? (tags: facebook) Posted by zeroinfluencer Filed in Authentic Media […]
September 19th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Chadmalik, you’re looking at it the wrong way.
Why wouldn’t they want more users to use their services?
It makes it easier for users.
I remember when the Mac first came out I didn’t believe they could get all the software developers to use scrollbars and pull down menus, and implement the mouse interactions the same way, but we all did. It made it possible for people to use 5 programs where they used to use 1. That was good for software developers.
Ultimately the money is on the side of the users, and if the users want it, they’re going to get it.
But I wouldn’t count out Google, they’ve got a lot of users, and a lot of money. I think they could probably buy Yahoo, but someone else would have to do the math on that.
September 19th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
BTW, so much for the theory that I don’t point to Marc Canter which he has been espousing of late. I bet I’ve sent 100 times more people to his site than he’s sent to mine, so you don’t get to bitch about it Marc. My regards to Jack.
September 19th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
[…] Canter wrote an open letter to Mark […]
September 19th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
just to be perverse for a moment, one of the awkward things about relationship data is that it always belongs to two people.
Which of them “owns” it? Do decisions about it always have to be made jointly? Do you allow one of them to share it with a trusted 3rd party site without consulting the other? Once you’ve let it out do you have any more responsibility over it?
I think Danah Boyd’s right on this. The opportunity for YASNS isn’t to be personal profile *publishers*, it’s to give me *more* control and restriction over my data so I can do stuff in private within a select group. I want to be able to twitter about the crap day I had at work with my lousy boss without said lousy boss ever finding out.
I don’t want a social network provider who shows tendencies towards being like Google … rushing to make it as efficient as possible to extract information about me for all and sundry. Increasingly, I’ll want a social network provider who betrays the instincts of a Swiss bank : discretion, trustworthiness.
In this sense, Facebook may be on the right track … demonstrating that they can be trusted to restrict my profile to a minimum for all except for a few of my friends.
September 19th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Social networking is not a market where a single M$FT-style hegemon will end up in winning imho. I think people have multiple “faces” per Erving Goffman’s research. A successful “social network” will probably be a dedicated and people will likely want to separate their personas. A single person might want to interact with like-minded others online using a persona as a “surfer”, a “stock trader”, a “unix sysadmin”, a “methodist”, a “dater”, a “libertarian”, etc. Why would they want those personas to have bleed-over?
Anyway speaking as a user its really been fairly trivial to recreate my social network moving from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. Way less lockin than people are saying to type in Age, Location, Interests, etc. Sure portability is going to happen but it seem like theres WAY too much emphasis on it at this early date in the evolution of the “social web”. I guss for super networkers like scoble with 3,000 connections its a problem but end of day most people have no more than 25 actual friends and 150 (or so) acquaintances they really want to hear from on a regular basis…
Also…why do tech bloggers spend so much time strategizing for Google / Yahoo / Facebook and the like? Its like tech bloggers are a bunch of teenage girls with a crush on the latest Captain of the Football Team. screw that. lets strategize for PEOPLE not rapacious corporations.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:53 am
[…] Canter wrote an open letter to Mark […]
September 20th, 2007 at 1:14 am
[…] Canter wrote an open letter to Mark […]
September 20th, 2007 at 3:26 am
“I don’t think FB users are really clamoring for this feature.”
I agree. I’ve interviewed my own kids about it and believe they’ll happily flock to the next place where all their friends are, indentity policies and PITA re-entering of stuff notwithstanding — for now. But people and companies who win in the end have to look ahead, and there will be a day when users demand it.
September 20th, 2007 at 7:00 am
[…] Canter’s open letter to Mark Zukerberg. […]
September 20th, 2007 at 7:37 am
[…] terrencebarr wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptOK dude - you’ve had your moment at TC40, the Allen and company scene, magazine covers, gotten lots of growth going on, stealing folks from Google, true leadership and all sorts of stratospheric valuations projected. … […]
September 20th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Facebook is so heavy - it’s so much a certain kind of thing that I don’t know if it can become something ubiquitous beyond the way it has been. It’s anchored to its own big-assed history (e.g., like Yahoo trying to be web 2.0 and just being more of a portal).
That the heaviness + success is now translating into big-headed-ness seems natural. Just a couple steps away from being passe. What we might want out of Facebook we’ll more likely get by Facebook blowing up / fizzling out and someone else doing it more right, more open, less heavy, more “ugly,” more wild for the world wild web.
September 20th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
nice job dude.
Facebook will work it self out through the normal cycle.
September 20th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Just to clarify I am not saying Dave and Marc’s comments are wrong, sure data sharing is cool for users, one day people will want this. But right now the reality of the software industry is that public companies and startups are (ex: Google) and want to (ex: Facebook) make huge sums of money on advertising to justify their valuations, and this whole social networking portability concept destroys the ad market without a doubt. Why, if this vision came to pass, software companies might have to be valued on users’ willingness to choose to use their software applications, instead of user lockin! That doesn’t get you on the Forbes list.
September 20th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
[…] In a comment yesterday on Marc Canter’s blog, when discussing the race to be the default identity system for the internet, I threw out an idea. “I wouldn’t count out Google, they’ve got a lot of users, and a lot of money. I think they could probably buy Yahoo, but someone else would have to do the math.” […]
September 20th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
[…] Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Open letter to Mark Zukerberg I managed to get an RDF file listing all my friends out of Facebook thanks to the new FOAF exporter. Now I just need everyone else to (be able to) do the same thing. (tags: TomMorris facebook API OpenData zuckerberg RDF FOAF DaveWiner MarcCanter identity socialnetworking google) […]
September 20th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
[…] Marc Canter is writing an open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zukerberg about taking the final step towards Facebook becoming what Dave […]
September 20th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
[…] Canter een open brief schrijft aan Facebook’s Mark Zukerberg en hem daarin verzoekt de laatste stap te nemen op weg […]
September 21st, 2007 at 11:52 am
[…] In a comment yesterday on Marc Canter’s blog, discussing the race to be the default identity system for the Internet.. […]
September 21st, 2007 at 12:19 pm
[…] In a comment yesterday on Marc Canter’s blog, discussing the race to be the default identity system for the Internet.. […]
September 21st, 2007 at 1:49 pm
[…] said. The goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be […]
September 21st, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Open letter to Mark Zukerberg…
This story has been submitted to Stirrdup. Your support can help it become hot….
September 21st, 2007 at 4:45 pm
[…] Marcâs Voice » Blog Archive » Open letter to Mark Zukerberg - […]
September 21st, 2007 at 4:52 pm
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be […]
September 21st, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Typo: should be Mark Zuckerberg
September 21st, 2007 at 7:20 pm
[…] on Facebook? Open up even more than Facebook. Arrington uses the example, “If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%.” Google will accomplish this by offering APIs, possibly as early as […]
September 21st, 2007 at 7:24 pm
[…] Marcâ??s Voice » Blog Archive » Open letter to Mark Zukerberg - […]
September 21st, 2007 at 8:47 pm
[…] 会議は超極秘。出席者は全員、会議で見たものを一切外部には口外しないよう守秘義務契約書（NDA）の機密条項に署名を求められたほどだ。このNDAを破り、オフレコでそのうち3人からグーグルが何を計画しているか、話を聞きだした。グーグルの目的、それはあのFacebook プラットフォームでさえ敵わないほどオープンになってFacebookに対抗することだ。仮にFacebookが98%オープンだというなら、グーグルは100%オープンでいく。 […]
September 21st, 2007 at 9:41 pm
[…] Open letter to Mark Zukerberg | Marc’s Voice Dave Winer quote (from comments) - Become the API the Internet never had — identity. Then rename the company to HolyGrailBook and change MZ’s title to The Pope of the Internet. (tags: facebook socialnetworks) […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 1:42 am
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%. Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 7:33 am
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 7:55 am
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 8:20 am
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 11:46 pm
[…] sure that I’ll get push back, criticism and insults - as I usually do. What I really like is when people correct me on my mispellings (thank you to Scott […]
September 23rd, 2007 at 3:59 am
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%. The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 […]
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:05 am
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be […]
September 23rd, 2007 at 11:33 am
[…] désormais d’être encore plus ouvert que la plateforme de Facebook. Si Facebook est ouvert a 98%, Google le sera à […]
September 24th, 2007 at 1:48 am
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be […]
September 24th, 2007 at 2:53 am
So if FB really 98% open? Isn’t it all most likely a walled garden? because of business plans?
And why should FB be the identity provider for all of us, they should simply implement OpenID and let me login with my open id account of my choice. Additionally they might want to be an OpenID provider of course. But please make it open.
(adding microformats to e.g. events would be cool, too
).
September 24th, 2007 at 5:21 am
[…] sera désormais d’être encore plus ouvert que la plateforme de Facebook. Si Facebook est ouvert a 98%, Google le sera à […]
September 24th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
[…] goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%. The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 […]
September 25th, 2007 at 6:02 am
Can you say, “Jealous”?
September 25th, 2007 at 9:00 am
[…] in the developer/Web 2.0 community about being slaves to Facebook” (see Marc Canter’s open letter to Mr Zuckerberg last […]
September 25th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
[…] Marcâs Voice » Blog Archive » Open letter to Mark Zukerberg - […]
September 26th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Dave, Amazon and American Airlines can use your Facebook identity…that was true long before F8.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:08 am
[…] site in question supports data export as it saves nasty page scrapping. But I will respond to the question of open social networks in another post. For now, the primary community challenge ought not to concern itself (as yet) with […]
September 28th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
[…] TechCrunch创始人Michael Arrington邀请了3个Google高层，为读者介绍公司对冉冉升起的Facebook如何看到，看看这篇博客很有必要: Google的目标是与Facebook竞争更开放的平台，如果Facebook 98％开放，那么Google要做到100％。 […]
October 4th, 2007 at 11:04 am
[…] http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2007/09/open-letter-to-mark-zukerberg […]
October 4th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
I’ve got an Amazon gift certificate burning holes in my pocket,
and I want to get the most bang for my buck.
Enter the Secret Amazon Web Pages:
http://tinyurl.com/38sojf
This is where you’re going to find the “latest sales, rebates, and limited-time offers” from
Amazon, and you can score some pretty deep discounts if you’re a savvy shopper.
Next, there’s the special Sale link. This is open every Friday, and ONLY on Fridays.
You can find the same good discounts here as you would in hidden Deals, although some
Fridays you can really get lucky and make off like an Amazon bandit - I’ve seen discounts
there as low as 75% off sticker price.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
There’s one special secret Sale link on Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/2r7ldr
[b]This is open every Friday and ONLY on Fridays! [/b]
You can find very good discounts here, although some Fridays you can really get
lucky and make off like an Amazon bandit - I´ve seen discounts there as low as 75%
off sticker Price.
October 9th, 2007 at 7:54 am
[…] We have the same problem with Facebook today that we’ve had with broadcast media for the duration: their customers are their advertisers, […]