Facebook: the Apple of the internet age (and Google, the Microsoft of the internet age)
At yesterday’s launch of Facebook Applications, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claimed that Facebook is a “social operating system” for the internet. His words may sound pretentious, but it is rather revealing about Zuckerberg’s true vision for Facebook.
In Web 1.0, companies built their own “walled gardens”, and the key was to keep eyeballs looking at your content – and therefore, your advertisers – for as long as possible. Microsoft bought Hotmail, Yahoo bought GeoCities, and AOL chomped up Time Warner – all in a bid to make their own walled garden the most successful one.
A parallel could be drawn with the early days of desktop computing, when companies like Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair battled with one another to produce their own proprietary computing systems with their own unique hardware and software.
Of course, desktop computing then progressed to Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop – when Microsoft built a platform – DOS, and later Windows – and many companies made IBM-compatible PCs; and the rest is history. Sure, there were blue screen of deaths, DLL-hell and lots of other problems, but by building a platform, Microsoft had a winner.
Meanwhile, Apple gained ground particularly in education and the creative industries, by making a better, integrated solution – introducing the beautiful Macintosh graphical user interface in the 1980s. To some extent, Apple also built a platform – although unlike on DOS, where developers built their own inconsistent (and often ugly) user interface as they saw fit, Apple made developers use a standard Macintosh user interface (a feature which Microsoft then copied when developing Windows).
Today, we are witnessing a second wave of internet development with Web 2.0. In fact, I would argue that it matches the second stage of development for desktop computing – in that we are seeing the kind of ‘open’ platforms being developed: Google is actively encouraging people and businesses to build on their open platforms using the Google APIs, whether it is Google Maps, the catalogues in Google Product Search, or the iGoogle web portal. These things can all be integrated into other websites – for example, putting YouTube videos in Myspace. Google isn’t particularly known for its user interface though – until the recent advent of iGoogle, it had a spartan, functional interface – kind of like Windows.
Meanwhile, with the Facebook API, others can develop applications for Facebook. Even in its early days, I am very impressed – Facebook now has its own Video app, Twitter has developed a Twitter application that runs on Facebook, Forbes has developed a Stocks application. Unlike Google though, Facebook ensures that every webpage follow a standard Facebook user interface – in a way, kind of like the Mac.
My prediction is that – Google will become the Microsoft of the web, and Facebook will become the Apple of the web. You may think that is a bit far-fetched, as Google is primarily thought of as a search engine, while Facebook is thought of as a social networking site. Yet, there are so many similarities – and I think it is only time before people see Google and Facebook as competitors – rather than Google/Yahoo/Microsoft.
Google does photos (Picasa). Facebook does photos (Facebook Photos)
Google does communications (Gmail, Google Talk). Facebook does communications (Inbox, Status Updates).
Google does video (YouTube, Google Video), Facebook does video (Facebook Video)
Google does blogging (Blogger). Facebook does blogging (Notes).
Sure, Google currently does a lot more than Facebook – but you could argue that for the things that Facebook can do, it does it better than Google. For example, because things in Google are developed by disparate teams, they are often not integrated. In contrast, Facebook delivers an integrated solution, and it builds networks of people rather more successfully than Google does. For example, on one page (Facebook), you have access to blogging, photos, videos, events and so on. To achieve the same on Google, you have to switch between Blogger, Picasa, YouTube, Google Calendar, and so on.
Furthermore, I don’t think it is too far-fetched for Facebook to eventually add features which supplant Google – it could work with Microsoft/Yahoo (probably Microsoft, since the F8 deal is with Microsoft) to build Search for Facebook; somebody will build a Mail application for Facebook, a Last.fm for Facebook – and someday, one could imagine that there is a Windows Live Messenger for Facebook.
Of course, it remains how things will play out. It is uncertain how Facebook will scale to fit all these new applications - and whether they have server farms that are as reliable as Google’s. Meanwhile, it is unknown how Facebook will deal with criticisms and dissent (okay, apart from the issue over news-feeds and mini-feeds last year). Furthermore, Google and Facebook are not the only ones in the game – Yahoo is a distant second in the search stakes – but it also owns high-profile sites like Flickr. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Live has thus far failed to make much of a dent. Yet, Microsoft is full of cash, and they can buy their way back in, and become relevant once again. Of course, in a way the Facebook deal represents Microsoft’s push back into relevance, but it remains to be seen how well this works out.
Looking into the crystal ball, I will make one further prediction for 5-10 years down the line: In 5-10 years, we will see a nascent movement towards Web 3.0. This will be the movement towards truly free and open-source web applications. For all the talk about free/open-source software on the desktop, there has been surprisingly little talk about free/open-source websites. For all its openness, Google and Facebook represent the Microsoft and the Apple vision of the world – there isn’t a major player which represents the GNU/Linux view of the world.
~*~
Postscript… (18 August 2007)
Seems like other people have independently reached the same conclusion, although in a somewhat different way – about the last “crystal ball” bit anyway.
WIRED calls on the “walled gardens” (social networks) to open up (http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net) while microformats talk about ‘portability’ between social networks (http://microformats.org/wiki/events/2007-07-28-portable-social-networks-meetup) – but perhaps most interesting of all is Brad Fitzpatrick (founder of Livejournal)’s work in Google –– with the ultimate aim of creating the actual plumbing and foundations for social networks to interoperate (of course, requiring the networks to actually adopt them…) – and of course, that would be a open-source solution, with copyrights owned by a foundation:
I would compare these developments to the beginning of (at least) two other things in the industry:
- Desktop operating systems in the 1980s-1990s (individual companies making their own system, to today’s standardised platforms that interoperate relatively decently with each other);
- The beginning of the web in the 1990s (starting with closed, walled gardens like America On-Line, MSN Network, etc turning into the main World Wide Web);
In the same way, today’s individual networks like Facebook, Myspace, etc could interoperate with one another; and I’m glad to find out that there are plans to make this interconnected social networking a reality.
