The headline reads like "Horse-carriage threatening the future of transportation".
Facebook is merely the latest evolutionary milestone, and it's crackling already.
There was once a time when AOL and compuserve defined what Joe Sixpack would have called "the internet" when asked.
It shattered and we entered the era of portals (yahoo, lycos), whose dominance, again, faded when the first worthwhile search engines came around.
Today we're just seeing the latest cycle in this pattern, the new concept now being the social graph. And just like before it's at first being beta-tested and refined in a small number of closed silos (facebook, twitter), simply because implementation, experimentation and monetization are so much easier in a closed ecosystem.
Now that the concepts have matured it's a matter of time before the good parts break out into distributed protocols and services, which will incrementally erode the monoliths.
Internet evolution at work, nothing to see here, please move along.
Comments
I think the pendulum will swing back to open pretty soon, it kind of feels we're at the black end of closedness in terms of the social graph.
In fact, a great time to start new companies shooting for the social graph. Facebook executes fantastically, but they'll stumble.
I agree.
The headline reads like "Horse-carriage threatening the future of transportation".
Facebook is merely the latest evolutionary milestone, and it's crackling already.
There was once a time when AOL and compuserve defined what Joe Sixpack would have called "the internet" when asked.
It shattered and we entered the era of portals (yahoo, lycos), whose dominance, again, faded when the first worthwhile search engines came around.
Today we're just seeing the latest cycle in this pattern, the new concept now being the social graph. And just like before it's at first being beta-tested and refined in a small number of closed silos (facebook, twitter), simply because implementation, experimentation and monetization are so much easier in a closed ecosystem.
Now that the concepts have matured it's a matter of time before the good parts break out into distributed protocols and services, which will incrementally erode the monoliths.
Internet evolution at work, nothing to see here, please move along.
totally agreed. it's interesting how many people I've talked to who think Facebook may be close to hitting a wall. we shall see...