The Truly Scary Part About Facebook Open Graph

http://jonathancavell.com/wordpress/social-media/2010/04/the-truly-scary-part-about-facebook-open-graph

by BurgherJon2 • 16 years ago

33 20 16 years ago

jessep2• 16 years ago

Yeah, good point. That is a kind of terrifying idea. They are, to a degree, accountable to their users, but other than that ... And it's quickly getting to the point where they have monopoly style lockin. I guess it feels to me, honestly, like they're already there. At that point they're barely even accountable to their users.

Like you said, they're not bad people, and they make a fantastic product, but it's still scary.

pwntifex• 16 years ago

Those are my sentiments too. I'm scared for one company to have that much power, but they do make a great product and have great tools to leverage it. I'm most likely going to transition to facebook-only logins on my sites off the platform. The social discovery advantages are just too large.

jessep2• 16 years ago

yeah, i'm also moving toward facebook only auth.

jmm2• 16 years ago

Accountable to users is a HUGE point. What happens to a site when users feel alienated or violated or whatever? Those users begin to walk away towards an emergent alternative.

The facebook "lock in" isn't a lock in at all. It's more like a disincentive to walk away from the user base, media storage, and slickness of the service. But that can be reproduced if need be, I think.

I think there are better things to be worried about than the hypothetical situation where Zuck goes nuts.

Groxx3• 16 years ago

Non-exportable data is pretty much the definition of a lock-in. There's essentially nothing that's impossible to walk away from, so the only thing worth considering is getting out what you put in.

In terms of a social application, it's legitimately harder to make a not-locked-in service. Who owns what, and how much of it is valid when you transfer data to another host? But it's still a lock-in, because there's no way to leave and retain things.

Imagine if your phone would only export contacts to a new phone if you stayed with your provider. Sure, you can still leave, but a data-lock-in is still a lock-in technique.

coderdude• 16 years ago

This is where the world is headed, though. We may not be used to it yet and we may not like it, but all the privacy we've been afforded in the past is due to the inability to amass this kind of data about people. Over time I think we'll get more used to the idea of someone knowing what songs we like, or where we like to eat (for the purposes of selling us those things). I seriously doubt our lives will become more private as we continue hand out our personal information left and right.

louislouis• 16 years ago

ok great, so they know what movies and music we like and are gona target us with better ads, but isn't that a good thing? I mean I may actually pay attention to ads if they try to sell me things I want.

lyime• 16 years ago

He keeps saying "no open", yet doesnt explain why he thinks its not open. Most of the data is actually available through API's.

kareemm• 16 years ago

i'll be interesting to see how regulators come down on FB b/c of their willingness to put user needs behind their own.

it's already starting to happen (not soon enough):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04...

cubes• 16 years ago

Either you trust an entity with your data or you don't. Whether that entity is an individual, a corporation with a bunch of grey-beards on the board, or a corporation run by someone who, presently, happens to be 25 isn't particularly relevant to the issue.

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

"Ownership" of this data is not clear to me. If FB does not allow large scale spidering/collecting of this meta data, then FB has the best use of it. On the other hand, if many other web sites use these meta data tags to be consistent with what is an ad-hoc standard, then anyone can spider 3rd party sites subject to their robots.txt file. Hopefully, by using the FB public APIs then developers can get sub-graphs of FB hosted data to work with.

I like standards, and I would like it if many people started supplying RDF for their sites. I am not sure yet if this advantage out weighs FB's lock on the best use of this data.

dpnewman• 16 years ago

i just don't want to see and think about facebook's brand everywhere i go on the web. it's one thing to actively choose to post something to facebook, even if from another site...or retweet or digg etc. but that "like" thing ... there's no action there, or sharing of the thought of the user clicking. it's so banal, and so vague, that to see it spread to every site - keeping up with the joneses - just bums me out like seeing a gap show up on valencia street ...or somesuch.

jay_kyburz• 16 years ago

Somebody should start a company making fake, but credible Facebook identities to sell.

Estragon• 16 years ago

That's the part which confuses me about all this. It's the easiest thing in the world to set up a cut-out Facebook account.

naner• 16 years ago

So only browse Facebook in an Incognito tab. Got it.

The Truly Scary Part About Facebook Open Graph

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