Facebook et al - its just a phase we're going through.....

Another interesting discussion on Techmeme, the penny seems to be dropping that closed networks like Facebook, MySpace etc are just closed, proprietary environments that are hard to export your data - your value, your LIFE dammit - out of.

And it is all so familiar in IT Land:

If you are an Old Far...er, Hand in this game you will have seen it before - soon after the emergence of a New Technology, a plethora of Proprietary Systems rush in to try to skim off as much value as they can. Its been true in Hardware (The BUNCH), O/S (Remember all the Unixes, and of course there is MSFT), and the Internet (recall AOL, CompuServe, Delphi, Prodigy etc)?

(Sorry Fred W, sometimes you can only "get it" if you have been round the block a bit - being young don't help here )

The reason is simple - before all the universally agreed standards emerge, the only way to build an end to end service is to design and implement it in one hit - and to extract maximum benefit for your hard work, keep it closed.

Except in the networked world that period of being "closed" is much shorter than it was in hardware or software, so as AOL proved to really grab value you have to try to do everything in the service - including things that are done better outside it already, like messaging, mail, media access etc. And you try and grab the "bog standard" consumer who is not really aware of the alternatives, nor who can do the little geeky things to make "early in" open services work smoothly.

So what we have here with MySpace, Facebook et al is just that phase - the rush to build the proprietary architectures and capture users before it all goes open....

....and the endgame is well scripted (see Scripting News)

And a suggestion to the Big Guys out there (apart from News Int'l) is - don't buy one, it will end all end in tears - go Open.

(Disclosure - in the initial iteration of the 'Net, many moons ago, I did a piece of work for the BBC about whether to go in with one of the "OSP" players (AOL) etc or to set up their own service on the - still emerging, Netscape had not yet emerged, just Mosaic iirc - Open Internet. We recommended the Open 'Net, they did it, and they have never looked back.)

So, Question to Marc A though is - last 'Net you built an Open Service, this time its a closed one - how about opening Ning up?

Update...Bear Sterns has just decided Yahoo should buy facebook - (well, they would, they are a merchant bank - hmmm...first bank raising its head....another sign of Bubble 2.0). We disagree - Yahoo has all the assets it needs to better F/B - plus a huge user base - and it should probably cost a fraction of a purchase to "get its shit together"

Update 2 - Commented in more detail on this on a new post here.