How Facebook Can Save Face

By Josh Quittner

It looks inevitable that Facebook will move away from its proprietary platform to the open platform of OpenSocial. Indeed, sources tell me that representatives from Facebook and Google (GOOG) met for the first time late yesterday afternoon. And already, Facebook investor and board member Jim Breyer is indicating that the social network would be willing to join the Everybody-but-Facebook Alliance.

Meanwhile, a favorite parlor game yesterday afternoon among pundits here in Techland was playing “What Should Facebook Do?” — though most of the people I spoke to were unwilling to go on the record. Virtually everyone’s answers however, boiled down to three options:

1. Do nothing. Facebook has a surprising amount of power in this relationship. It has 50 million members and continues to grow. As long as that’s the case, developers will continue to craft apps in FBML, its proprietary platform language.

2. Surrender, totally and at once. Converting Facebook’s platform to open HTML isn’t difficult from a programming standpoint or particularly time-consuming. Besides, developers will love it. Many have privately griped that Facebook’s platform is too gnarly and they look forward to simple HTML and Javascript. And no one I’ve spoken to can find any real problem with this shift from Facebook’s perspective — indeed, the move should benefit Facebook since its members will be able to stay put, where FB can serve ads at them, while doing more outside the walls of FB.

3. Some combination of 1 & 2.

One person who was willing to go on the record was John Lilly, COO of the Mozilla Corporation, whom I had dinner with last night. Who better to talk about the virtues of openness? Lilly, in fact, made me think that Option 3 was the smartest way to go. If he were running Facebook, he said, “I would not let Google take the ‘open’ mantle from the world.” He said that if Facebook decides that it needs to move from FBML to HTML — “and I’m not saying I’d necessarily do that if I were Facebook.” But if he did, “I’d cause Google some problems first.”

How? “If I were Facebook, I wouldn’t let Google say, ‘We are the Web.’ I’d call b.s. on them,” Lilly said. OpenSocial isn’t open! It’s a Google-run alliance; Google is calling the shots and is in charge of running the thing. But that’s kind of bogus since theoretically, it could cause OpenSocial to move in ways that benefited it. True open standards initiatives tend to be run by open boards.

Of course, the down side to working with open-standards boards is they tend to move very slowly. Google is known for having little patience for that sort of thing.

One person I spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous because he is close to the current action, said challenging Google on whether OpenSocial was truly open was a red herring: “It’s a false challenge,” this person argued. “Even if Google has significant control over the API, the way it’s inevitably going to get controlled in reality is by the interoperable implementations that that people actually use. Interoperability itself will be the glue that keeps it from becoming proprietary. This is a dynamic that has worked very well for Internet standards over the years including HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP itself, despite some very large and dominant vendors who would have preferred to take control of things like those. ” He also referenced this Anil Dash piece, which provides all the ammo you need to support the inevitability of Option 2.

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“We’ll see how quick those 50 million user base is going to evaporate.” – Posted By tiddle, nyc, ny

The userbase will not be drastically affected.

The site is eventually going to lose some people. But there are always new customers to seek out and capture. I do not believe that Facebook needs to worry about backlash. They are popular and most people want to be a part of what’s popular even if they think it is silly, intrusive, or downright mean.

People are creatures of habit. They are so used to going onto Facebook and leaving because of a few protesters will not make sense. If I leave the site and all of my friends are still on there, I will be left out. There would be no gain for me to leave just because I had some problem with the site. The site would not be hurt because when I left, my friends would find new friends and get them to join. My small insecurities and issues would be negligible in the eyes of Facebook.

People need to stop trying to go against the grain. People are only showing backlash towards Facebook because it is popular. Those who don’t fit in always want others to join them in protest. But the majority of users are happy with their Facebook experience. The only way that people would leave is if Facebook terminated the site or something else bigger and better came along. Dissent does not always make sense.

Posted By Yadgyu, Harkeyville, TX : November 7, 2007 7:42 pm

Brandon: giving the users what they want? How about Facebook Ad, which seeks to sell out the user’s personal details to advertisers?

Yadgyu: Surely that’s the hope of Zuckerberg, which is to make billions out of it. I’m voting with my feet on Facebook. And if any of my 50 million peers, according to your “logic”, so much the better. We’ll see how quick those 50 million user base is going to evaporate.

Posted By tiddle, nyc, ny : November 7, 2007 11:47 am

Facebook should do whatever brings in the most money.

If some people are offended and leave the site, the better it is for Facebook. Facebook should allow for people to give feedback about the website. Any person who disagrees with Facebook’s decisions should have their accounts closed and their IP addresses blocked.

User backlash will easily be drowned out by the sea of money flowing in. Facebook has the potential to generate billions of dollars for itself. Those who leave the site are going to feel like fools.

Posted By Yadgyu, Harkeyville, TX : November 6, 2007 8:36 pm

I full-heartedly agree with the first commenter on this one; Facebook became an iconic staple with college students because of its exclusivity, and while Facebook is going to obviously make moves for financial and market share gains, one can only hope they still have interest in giving the users what they want; or in this case, what they don’t want.

Posted By Brandon, Knoxville TN : November 5, 2007 2:37 pm

How do we define “open”? Even if the ownership of the standard is not held by some more neutral organization like w3c, inherently if it enables interoperability by heterogeneous vendors, it’s open (or at least going toward that direction). This is in contrast to the arrogance of Zuckerberg to declare his “genius” of claiming Facebook to be THE platform, and screw everybody else. Granted that Facebook has 50 million users, but nobody is going to repeat the expensive IBM mistakes to allow Microsoft to “own” the interfacing to a large number of users without a fight, which is exactly what Google (and MySpace) does here.

Posted By tiddle, nyc, ny : November 5, 2007 12:54 pm

It would be unwise for facebook to further open itself up. Remember facebook’s core demographic is the college student, which was originally the sole requirement for membership. College students are very proud of the exclusivity that facebook used to offer, as evidenced when users cried fowl last year when facebook relaxed its membership policies to allow any individual to join. Also, facebook has the “its not MySpace” sentiment working for it, and switching to open HTML would essentially transform it into MySpace, thus alienating a huge number of influential members. College students are savvy, and don’t like to be pandered to or used as a tool for financial gain. By inundating the site with banner ads and poorly designed (by inexperienced users, no less) profile pages, facebook could potentially lose the very fan base that built the company. As a devout user, I sincerely hope that Zuckerberg hasn’t forgotten how ingrained facebook has become into the college lifestyle. It’s something of a rite of passage to create a facebook when one first enters college (or at least it used to be; bitter reminiscence?). Don’t mess it up.

Posted By locke, columbia, MO : November 3, 2007 10:27 am

That’s probably bogus. Why would facebook charge people when they can easily make more money by selling advertisements? And it’s not like their in a cash bind or anything.

Posted By Edward, Severna Park, MD : November 2, 2007 4:04 pm

I heard Facebook would start charging member around next year

Posted By Kwon, Se : November 2, 2007 1:04 pm

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