Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2010, and describes the situation at that time: Facebook’s new email service, a possible Facebook search engine and the Google-Facebook dispute. Much has changed since; Facebook is now part of Meta and Twitter is now X.
When the internet was created, it was seen as an incredible opportunity to share all kinds of information anywhere in the world in real time. Then social networks came along, giving a new meaning to the word “socialising”. Experts and governments are already studying the fact that the internet is being dominated by a handful of companies.
On the one hand we have Google, a company that has taken on the job of collecting all the information on the internet, organising it and displaying it according to a relevance ranking. Although there’s already plenty of criticism about whether it uses its authority to rank results according to its own interests, the problem right now isn’t Google, since we can say that, for all its size, this company adds value and makes the internet bigger.
The real problem is Facebook. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee himself, creator of the World Wide Web (the “www”) and commonly called “the father of the internet”, has pointed to the closed circuit that Facebook is building, even before the new features it is adding, and those still to come, were known.
The time has come to ask ourselves whether Facebook is what we want for the future, since we’re turning it into an “all-powerful giant” that destroys value. Over time, Facebook will become a necessity for everyone (today it’s already a necessity for a company’s website).
As you can see, every website or blog includes a button to share its content on Facebook, just as we have for Twitter. The difference between Twitter and Facebook is that Twitter shares and Facebook “locks in”.
Once every website passes through Facebook, it will have all the information Google has for its searches, so when it adds its own search engine, you probably won’t need to go through Google.
Facebook collects contact information from every service and lets you bring it into the platform, but it selfishly won’t allow any other platform to feed on its contacts or its content. That has led to the war with Google, since Facebook didn’t play fair and Zuckerberg tried to be too clever.
Now it has launched its own email service, and once again it won’t let you add your “Facebook mail” contacts to another email account, though it will the other way round. Facebook acquired Skype, and few people have stopped to imagine what that could lead to: the day will come when, with Facebook on your phone, you’ll be able to open the Skype app and call your contacts for free, which could seriously hurt the telecoms sector (this is only speculation, but there it is).
And finally, I’m not sure we should give so much power to someone who doesn’t think twice before taking anyone to court, flaunting the authority we’re all giving him. As we all know, Facebook has obtained the word “Face” as a registered trademark, so, as it has already done in the past with sites that used a similar name, it will now force any page containing “Face” to change its name.
Facebook is fun for some and useful for others, but… is it really what we want for the future?
Further reading
Featured image: cellanr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
