Facebook Lives

In a previous post, I worried for the health of Facebook but acknowledged its role as a phone book and for possibly becoming the unifying form of online identity. Slowly, it appears to be coming true. People are usually more comfortable with an alias, but there are situations where it's more appropriate to use your legal name.

The Facebook Connect sign-in process is just one click if you stay signed in to facebook.com, which is much more convenient than the redirects and typing involved with OpenID. This is a huge advantage. Also, Facebook Connect is easier to implement for developers. It's quite convenient to have a way to get your visitors' real faces and full names to appear along with their comments with no extra work on their part. People might be more thoughtful when posting under their real name.

You may have also heard that new users are flocking to Facebook. This bodes well for Facebook as an uber phone book. People who haven't met in years can exchange a few instant messages. Facebook contains the feature sets of so many sites and apps that it is probably the closest thing to a Web OS. I could have written this post as a note. Every page and group gets its own message board and image gallery.

It's just too bad that it all has to be under the umbrella of facebook.com. I have not seen any usage of the APIs to make use of all of this communication on the rest of the web. This is partially because Facebook does not allow saving this data due to privacy concerns, and it's not as appealing to query it every time. But it just wasn't designed for this sort of thing. The idea is to pump data in, not to let it out.

So, Facebook is alive and well, albeit not out of the woods as far as turning a profit. It has scaled. The layout and functionality is all there. The people are there and available to talk to. The disappointment is in the apps and API, because these play second-fiddle to the things that really matter. I appreciate the social value of Facebook today, but I would love some decent competition in the spirit of OpenID and OpenSocial. (I say "spirit" because in their present and foreseeable forms, they're just not going to cut it.)