Modern Serf

Google announced “Buzz,” their new social media aggregator something-or-other this afternoon. Currently the media is reporting on it as a “Facebook killer,” and that may even be Google’s intention, but I think it could be more than that.

Facebook is a frequently treated as a communications platform – you post content and your friends respond to it. It has what I’d consider three separate channels of communication – chat, wall posts, and the inbox – each which represents a different concept of what communication can be. Yet there are a million other ways to communicate – mail, telephone, SMS, AIM, email, twitter, blog comments – many of which are definitely not going anywhere and make facebook’s feature set completely redundant.

Facebook’s real value is in the profiles. This may seem counterintuitive – I certainly look at the news feed a lot more than i look at any one profile – but think of it this way: every news item is really a change or an addition to that persons profile. The profile is a pointer to that users identity – it is a conceptual address that replaces all of the physical (eg. 113 Main St.) or mechanical (eg 617/555-9064) addresses for something that is related to that person with the identity of the person himself.

So rather than trying to destroy Facebook, Google Buzz should be looking to supersede it – absorb it, commoditize it. Make it so that people say “I was checking out her Facebook on Buzz the other day.”

Facebook’s eventual fall from grace will be this – it tries to hold every piece of information within itself. Conceptually, this is like the early internet providers like AOL or CompuServe having a “walled garden”, a subset of the internet that they allowed their users to consume. Eventually this system came to an end and the whole internet was opened up to them. For the most part, people dont access AOL’s proprietary content anymore (im not sure such a thing even exists) – they see the web through Google.

The best parts of AOL still exist today – that is to say their Instant Messaging protocol – but AOL is nothing like the dominant force it was in 1995. Likewise, Facebook will probably have an even more feature-bloated portal five years from now, but the only really valuable part of its property will be the profiles and the reliable identities that they represent and establish.

facebook’s bloat reminds me of “portals” in 1999- i understand that they want people to spend every single minute on facebook, but shit, this is the web; there is zero cost to going to a different site or even having a tab with both open.

Features which are inherent to facebook

pictures – “face”
the wall -”book”
profile pages

Features which are useful but not necessary
events
groups
fan pages

Features that are tacked on to keep people on the site to expose them to ads – what should be done instead

chat – link to IM
games – link to games
private messaging – link to email

facebook has some incredibly valuable data about their users, and almost all of that comes from their “core features” the social network and the data supplied by the users.

what id really like to see is facebook make their core feature – social management – work better.
FOR EXAMPLE:
when you click on a link on a friend’s page – lets say under “music” they have sigur ros. If facebook were really about building and maintaining your social networks, wouldn’t the most useful response be to show your other friends that have the same interest?

But thats not what happens. rather, it goes to a listing of all the related groups and fan pages. I list something like a hundred bands that I like, but I’m not a member of any of their “groups” – i just list them as interests.

Here’s a more specific example – lets say youve got friends all over the place – college buddies, work friends, and so forth. while you like all of them, you dont want to be inviting people with whom you went to high school to an event across the country from them.

Yet, on event or group invitation pages, you can only filter your friends by network; not even by location, but network – a vestigial feature from facebook’s college days that has been officially deprecated and is essentially irrelevant today.

And finally, sometimes you might want to privately tag people with data that they would not want to post themselves – maybe you have some friends that like getting baked and some that are straight-edge, or two people in the same clique that don’t get along. it would be quite useful if you could make note of that and at least have facebook alert you of potential conflicts – sort of like a platonic dating service – but apparently supporting FarmVille was a higher priority.

mandatory disclaimer:
of course, facebook is apparently worth billions, so who am I to tell them what to do.