Facebook is the 21st Century AOL

Today has been pretty special for Facebook. Their f8 developer conference, the third of its kind, showed how big they want to be. With 500 million or so residents, the site is pretty big. The openness of its users is amazing in this day and age of identity theft, and the CEO declaring that privacy is all but dead; you’d think people might shy away from the site.

I guess that isn’t the case. For some reason, Facebook thinks my account isn’t valid. I’m thinking it is just a glitch in their matrix, but perhaps my comments about it being a giant chain letter and mail list made the Facebook unhappy. And no one puts Facebook in the corner.

Well, with that in mind, MG Siegler of TechCrunch fame, made a post titled “I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet” and I keep thinking about AOL. It was once flying high with the number of accounts. In 2003, AOL had about 30 million customers. I know this because Jason Smathers was prosecuted for stealing 92 million AOL account names and selling them to spammers. This was well after the Internet started killing the idea of a proprietary interface into the web and social media became all the rage. In 97, they had 10 million users. 30 million is pretty big for their style of architecture.

Facebook has 500 million people. The ease of access, signup, and interaction makes services like AOL look like wooden blocks. The time was right for Facebook. And it has a lot of momentum. But I don’t think it will stay around forever as a high flying service. As interconnectivity becomes more pervasive, the site will lose its luster. Certainly, as the sophistication of the user base increases, people will wonder why they are there.

I think Facebook has taken the Internet hostage, but doesn’t control it. For all of the fans of independence, who cry out against Apple controlling what goes on and how. I just can’t see why people aren’t that upset about Facebook. AOL lost its edge because of the sophistication of the tools and users that utilized them. If AOL had taken the necessary steps to integrate into the Internet, they would still be the ones to beat. Facebook is borne of a sophisticated lot of people, the leadership knows what it takes to make it easy to get online. Customer acquisition costs are low because people are drooling over themselves to provide every manner of detail in the hopes of finding friends in this really cool forum. Classmates could have been the one to beat in that regard too.

This step of integrating sites into one login, the same thing that has been tried again and again, will probably fail. This unified login stuff should put most people on edge. Like cookies used to be feared and deleted because they track your site visits. It seems that people really don’t care about privacy. Well, nearly 500 million people don’t.

I’m not a fan of Facebook integration, or site integration at all. It would be like my visit to McDonalds being shared with my doctor, so when I visit my doctor; he asks why I got a Big Mac. Who I am, where I go, and what I do is no ones business as long as I’m not harming someone in the process.

The growth of Facebook isn’t surprising. Exponential growth is expected in a social network with such a friendly and open architecture. You tell your friend, and she tells her friends, and so on and so on. That is also how viruses are transmitted. I say this about growth because Siegler says:

[Zuckerberg] also noted that while it took the service 5 years to get to 100 million users, it took only 3 years to reach the same total in terms of mobile users.

The idea of a single entity being integrated across a large swath of the Internet, but not watched, should also make a person step back. Why are they not worried about a private entity selling every bit of data they post on a website with their true identity and interconnections being mapped out? But they are absolutely terrified of the Government doing the same. Except the Government has no interest in making a profit from the fact that you logged into Facebook, and then went Techcrunch. Facebook does. Especially if they figure out a way to sell relevant advertisements based on your travels. And that is the end game.

People using Facebook, are making millions of dollars for the shareholders of Facebook, and divulging way too much information into a corporate database.

Sieglers article is populated by the same interests we used to have 12+ years ago when I created a portal [and that is what Facebook is, just limited to social data and games] and launched the first free internet service, and created an anti-spam mail service. The terminology is slightly different, but things like being social, keeping the site sticky so people stay on the site and don’t need to go anywhere, and page views with easy access are still prevalent today.

I think the Internet is plenty connected. What it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, is owned and operated by one company. Logging into Facebook should only log me into that site. Anything else, violates my sense of security. Phrases like this are probably why my account is currently flagged as having an invalid email address. Even though I’ve been getting emails all day on that same account.

Like Siegler says at the end of his post linked above, and on this post. Evil.