Facebook just launched their previously-rumored IM functionality. It offers the opportunity to chat with your facebook friends in real-time over the network in your browser.
Kottke mentioned in the past that Facebook is the new AOL. Over the last few years, they've taken increasingly greater steps towards the walled garden approach: sure, interact with our users, but only if you do it via our proprietary methods. AOL neglected HTML in favor of RAINMAN. For Facebook, you have to dive into a world of FBML and FQL. It's a tradeoff between consistency and flexibility, to be sure, but the discussion of the viability of a closed system like Facebook applications on an open system like the internet is rather substantial and best left to a different blog post entirely.
After an interesting few years of back-and-forth battling, AOL eventually ditched their walled-garden approach for their IM protocol and moved towards some openness by publishing guidelines to OSCAR for 3rd party projects like Pidgin or Trillian to use. It could be argued that the growth and ubiquity of the AIM network is sustained through the ability to run AIM over Trillian, Adium, iChat, and others. My entire generation (say, those in college right now) tends to use AIM nearly exclusively, with few of my personal friends using the official AIM client itself.
The thing that's interesting about today's development is that Facebook has diverged from AOL's model, albeit in a backwards way. Facebook Chat uses their existing web interface to deliver their new functionality. Whereas AOL moved from walled garden to tentative openness, Facebook moved from walled garden to, well, walled garden. You can only chat while on facebook.com, you can't use it via their Facebook iPhone/mobile apps, and you can't use a third-party app to interface with the network.
This is a relatively new thing, at least for me. I've dabbled on most major networks: AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber, and Bonjour. The common link between them all is that they're all based on relatively open protocols, at least to the point where you can use them in an Adium or a Trillian. If there was a closed IM network, they at least provided desktop functionality. Facebook doesn't. A straight web-only interface makes it difficult to really be a viable communication medium.
There are a few reasons why I enjoy Adium (though my arguments will likely apply to Pidgin or iChat or whatever your flavor of IM client). For one, I'm a habitual conversation history tracker. I have logs dating back six or seven years. It's helpful to me—I can't tell you how many times someone says something, I close the conversation and immediately forget which time I was supposed to meet them or the line of code I was supposed to check out. Facebook logs your conversations between sessions but not permanently, supposedly (Facebook, as its customary style, is fairly ominously-vague when it comes to your personal information and longevity).
Secondly, you lose out on the natural behavior of your operating system. I actually just received an IM from a friend right now. How did I know? I'm in a different Space in OS X, so my IM windows aren't visible. It's because of OS behaviors that, as a user, you grow accustomed to. Step one: I hear my normal IM ding. Step two: I get my Adium duck flapping its wings on my Dock, with a OS X-standard "1" icon superimposed on the Adium icon, signaling to me that I have one message to check out. Step three: I get a growl notification that tells me the sender and their message, if I want to bother to check that section of my screen before command+tabbing over to Adium to actually read or respond. Beyond that, there's a multitude of OS-specific behaviors you expect: on a Mac, I expect command+W to kill the current conversation tab, shift+command+]/shift+command+[ to tab between conversations, and hey, Adium does a great job with interacting with Address Book to grab user icons and first and last names. You don't get any of this with Facebook Chat.
Even the web interface isn't very standard. For one you have to remain on facebook.com to receive messages, you have to resist a stale session (after 10 minutes or so you're auto-logged out unless you visit another page), and some pages don't even work (try the "People You May Know") link on the main page.
With these limitations, it might not surprise you to learn that I'm not too enthused about Facebook Chat's prospects. I can't really see it being much more than a "hey, I'm in a cluster on campus and can't get on AIM or MSN... here's the info you wanted". I don't necessarily see it as taking the place of existing networks, particularly because it's so closed. Not only is it web-only—you can't use it with Adium—but it's also Facebook-only—you can only use it with your Facebook friends. That kills prospects of those who want their IM handle public and don't want to have to befriend every user.
Google ran into similar circumstances with GTalk: they gave easy web access to GMail users to talk to existing email contacts, but at the same time pushed open and accessible Jabber standards to allow interoperability. If Facebook wants to really push Facebook Chat (which, since they tossed a floating div on the bottom of every one of their pages, seems to suggest this), they would be smart to take a move out of Google's handbook and add some open operability to their network.
For those following along at home, in July I wrote about the possibility of digg emulating features of Facebook ("diggbook", if you will). It looks like I was pretty close.
Kevin just announced that they'll be adding a more social-centric feel to digg. A short video of some of the features is now available. What these new features do is make the concept of friending people via digg much more appealing. You can point out particular stories to your friends with a quick message (which is great, since I usually tend to do that over IM or email), and what's most important is revamping the user profile page to add profile pictures, display user information, show your recent activity (including comments, diggs, and profile updates), and so on. As I speculated earlier, it's a lot like the concept of Facebook's mini feed.
What's missing right now is a social recommendation aspect. It looks like they're going to be adding some additional filters for you so you can more easily see comments, diggs, and other additions by your friends, but they still need a way to either analyze previous diggs and show stories you might be interested in, or a way to analyze your friends' diggs and make recommendations based on that. The former looks to be a goal they have in mind for the future ("Story Suggest"), but it seems like that might be months away from being released.
The thing with digg is that they love commenting on upcoming releases, although they tend to do that way too early. They spill the beans ahead of time too much, which, in my opinion, lessens the impact of any changes and updates they make. It's fun to mention that there will be a vague update down the line, but there's a point where you want to withhold information to either make a bigger impact, keep competitors in the dark, and so on. It also reduces irritation for your userbase. They've been hammering away the "digg images is coming soon!" line for months now. They've been saying comment changes are coming soon. But those types of announcements seem to be a tad bit on the early side.
I just logged into Facebook and noticed that there's a public search on the front page. Upon login, you get something like this:
Now people can search for this listing from Facebook's Welcome page. In a few weeks, it may also be found through search engines like Google.
Since your search privacy settings are set to "Everyone," you now have a public search listing. This means that friends who aren't yet on Facebook will be able to search for you by name from our Welcome page. Public Search Listings may only include names and profile pictures.
In a few weeks, these public search listings can be found by search engines like Google. No privacy rules are changing; anyone who discovers your public search listing must register and log in to contact you via Facebook. Learn More.
So basically, Google (and other search engines) can now index your public Facebook profile. Somewhat disturbing at first glance, but it's really not too big of a deal. If a potential employer really wants to look you up on Facebook, they could just create a dummy account and see your own search results anyway. Just reiterates the point that privacy features are probably worth investigating.
I wonder if Facebook's long-term goal is to start opening up other portions. Say, an extended public profile page. A public groups page (so the public could wander into forum discussions). Public network pages. And so on. From a business standpoint, it's pretty fantastic: Facebook must have tens (hundreds?) of millions of pages that could get indexed by search engines, which could result in plenty of additional search engine traffic (and resulting advertising revenue). Almost surprising they haven't moved in this direction in the past.
Let me make a prediction: within the next 1-2 years, regardless of whether or not Facebook gets bought out by a Google or a Yahoo or a Microsoft, Facebook will gain in popularity while simultaneously eschewing their core group of users.
Now let me elaborate. The problem here is Facebook apps. This is a very, very large can of worms. Facebook apps, by all accounts, is a tremendous success. Thousands of developers are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon to develop and extend original Facebook functionality and to tap into the very impressive Facebook user base. A Facebook app developer just sold out to another company for millions (although the story has been subsequently denied, somewhat, by the purchasing company). So things are looking good. Well, somewhat.
I was all about Facebook just 6 months ago. To me, they could do no wrong. Everything they had released seemed to be cleverly conceived and designed, they had their priorities straight (extensive privacy controls, logical design, etc.) When the Facebook developer API came along, I was tentatively positive about it. Yeah, no one wants to deal with crap like auto-loading music or flashing graphics or - gasp! - handing design sense to the users, since the common man's design sense is unmatched in its stupidity. Just look at MySpace.
I think Facebook has a novel idea. Spread the wealth; let others expand upon your brilliant service, let people fill niches you don't want, focus on building a great platform for others. And for me, this suddenly became a very Apple vs. Microsoft situation.
Facebook, to me, had been very Apple. I say that in an ideological sense-- they anticipated my needs, knew what I wanted to see and know, and sent the whole thing to me in such a polished and clever package. Simple, thought out, and what I wanted. At the risk of bringing up some tentative OS arguments, I'd say this resembles Apple. Apple has always been proclaimed to be the one who understands the user, understands what they want, and sometimes uses their own power to force concepts and ideas upon the user in striving towards a certain idea in how things should be done. This is the superior way of doing things if you can trust the company to react to the market, to continue to anticipate your needs, and to just excel. If they don't, you're kinda screwed.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has earned its billions upon billions by building a platform that lets others extend themselves off of. The Lisa and original Macintosh are the antithesis: initially fairly difficult for third parties to code for, it paved the way for Microsoft's technology to eventually dominate. Based on this, I wonder how the Microsoft-esque way of doing things, by building a platform rather than a product, will impact users.
The thing that drove the point home for me was when Facebook dropped their class functionality from the site. It wasn't used as extensively as other functionality, but was still used enough to be worthwhile. You'd add your details about classes you're taking each semester and then you could click to see who else is taking that class. It works great in trying to see if you have any friends taking the same class as you, for example. Facebook dropped this a few weeks ago in favor of letting developers handle it on the API. So what happens now? Well, now we have competition. But I'm not sure competition is a good thing in this case.
Even on the Facebook developer blog they didn't mention a replacement- they mentioned two replacements. By this point I'm sure more have entered the market, too. This is a case where having more apps doing the same core functionality is completely self-defeating. Now I have none of my friends using the built-in Facebook app, five percent of my friends using Facebook classroom app A, three percent using Facebook app B, and one percent using Facebook apps C through F. The result? I can't tell who's taking a class with me unless I want to add seven apps to my account.
It's not always the case -- there are apps that are more visual where my friends don't need to install them to see a benefit -- but I think it's a conflict that will become more and more apparent as we go on. Part of the reason Facebook grew in popularity was that it offered so much in such an attractive package. If you split that into hundreds and thousands of mini-apps, do you lose out on the initial appeal of Facebook? From the looks of it, yes.
I think Facebook is going to drift more towards looking like MySpace and less like Facebook. This will alienate the core group of early adopters, namely college students, who used it as a communication medium. The result? Probably more traffic and more criticisms for Facebook.
At this point, I'm starting to wonder if we're going to see a new network start experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity. With Facebook diluting itself, perhaps it's time for a more friend-centric service to gain a footing.
This might just be a shot in the dark, but I wonder if digg is going to start moving in a more social direction. Kevin Rose recently commented:
BIG feature overhauls coming... just give us a little more time.
What we know is that there will be a new images category, so there can be a bit more organization there. Hopefully news will stay news, video will be in video, and images in the images category. Also, in the past I recall that Rose mentioned that they want to somehow bring those separate pieces of digg together more... right now the Videos section is pretty inactive, since it isn't the front page. I'm guessing they might do some sort of a mix of all three for the front page.
But if you have a mix of everything on the front page (News, Videos, Podcasts, and Images), it gets a bit muddy. Kevin has said in the past that they really want to start bringing in more personalized news, so if you like Linux, Baseball, and Business, those stories will become more stressed to you personally.
This, to me, seems reminiscent of Facebook's News Feed. Personalized recommendations based off of friends and groups. Makes me wonder if this is the sort of direction that digg will eventually head towards. Along those lines, it might make sense to personalize social aspects more- give digg profile pages more room to customize so people can comment on more aspects of themselves (professional bio, additional contact information, topics they're interested in, a cleaner listing of friends, etc.) I think it's silly to think that digg is going to encroach on Facebook, but it's foreseeable that they could be leveraging some of the same ideas that Facebook has stumbled upon over the last couple of years.