Marc's Voice

A tipping points towards a distributed future

In this land of chaos we call our ‘open web’, it’s getting harder and harder to tell friends from foes everyday.

Local favorite FriendFeed has sold out to Facebook, which a year ago was clearly a closed data silo opposing our efforts at opening up the web.  But now Facebook (it could be argued) is the leading open platform, providing developers ways of not just leveraging the FB social graph, content and activity stream - but also providing two-way APIs for developers to use Facebook for logging in, importing friends or sharing content.

Is this Facebook our friend or enemy?

Once could certainly argue that FriendFeed merging with Facebook COULD be a good thing, as Robert Scoble nervously explains. But waiting for truly open conversations can never happen on Facebook.  That’s the tradeoff you make between closed and open.  Great functionality controlled by one vendor, versus the chaos of the masses and ‘open community’, not normalized with each other, fighting for miniscule market share and hits - so some VC will invest in them!

The fact that Facebook announced real-time search and APIs into it’s mail system - the same day it bought FriendFeed is missed on most people.  Facebook is, by far, the faster evolving, most innovative, hardest working, more productive platform out there today.  Facebook seems to define hungry and open for that matter - so I don’t really see why people are so flummoxed over FB buying FB.

Of course you have to eat your salt with the sweet taffy of Facebook, cause they’re also a closed data silo.  They’re continued blurring of the edge between open and closed is also defining the conversation.

What I like are some of the recent promotional and cross-marketing ideas coming out.  It shows that there IS a future for us.  Dr. Dre will clearly have his own platform, and HP will will support whoever can help them sell machines.

But back here in ‘openville‘ it all seems like a crazy chaotic world, with each upsetting of the apple cart leading to another let-down and betrayl unless of course everyone is finally figuring out what I warned about years ago (and Dave Winer years before that)….

….. all technology platforms need multiple vendors.

We can’t have ONE social network, ONE microblogging platform, ONE operating system, ONE app platform.  Clearly this is an era of multiplicity and openness.

Everything we judge should be based upon:

- are there multiple vendors offering this?

- is the source code available - even if I have to pay for it?

- can users move their data (profile, social graph, content) in and out - freely - with no strings attached?

- is this platform moving forward, or standing still (i.e. rate of innovation and iteration)

- are there open two-way APIs for me to get data out as well as stuff it in (i.e. level playing field)

- are the interests of the users and investors aligned

Michael Arrington once said “why should we want an ‘open solution’ when Facebook gives us such a great integrated experience already?” The humor is probably lost on most people, because Michael Arrington himself has benefited from Facebook being open and he himself doesn’t even use Facebook.

So is this battle about “who’s the most open” or “what’s the best experience?”

A wise man would say it’s fine to have superior experience now, but eventually we’ll have an open distributed world -where both large and small networks and platforms can exist side-by-side.  Ideally a user would be a member of both types of platforms, and freely move to whatever tool, community or solutions matched his/her particular needs or context - at that particular time.

But everyone has to take side, support a particular solution or argue a particular point.

So we have Twitter against Ident.ca.

OpenID versus InfoCards (in the land of SAML)

Blogging versus social networking versus microblogging/twittering

Cyworld versus Mixi versus Hyves versus Xing versus Multiply versus Ecademy…… [HELLO!  No one winner!]

Videogames versus Casual gaming versus other forms of Addictive behavior

Banner ads versus adsense versus embedded ads versus targeted ads versus interstitial……

Hell yes - it’s a tipping point.

Hell yes - we’re in a fight for our lives.

Hell yes - it’s all happening real-time - but a distributed world is where we’re headed towards.