Interwebology: Interconnecting the Interweb
The Internet has no Once and Future King. It more accurately seems to have an unending succession of short-lived monarchs. A decade ago Friendster was the “hot new thing.” When MySpace came out there was a mass migration, followed by another when Facebook hit the scene. Friendster has since folded, but MySpace still seems to be vying for an honourary Dukedom.
Facebook currently enjoys twice the monthly visitors of MySpace, which itself doubles the popularity of Twitter. Other sites like Classmates.com and LinkedIn make the list, but are hardly competitive. While Facebook could easily look down its nose at its pitiable competitors, it has thrown them a bone in the form of Facebook Connect.
Superficially, Facebook Connect is a fairly simple tool that allows users to log on to various services with their Facebook credentials. On a broader scale, however, it represents a movement among Internet companies away from total autonomy and towards interconnectedness. This should be an intuitive move, given that these companies are built on a technology designed to connect. However, it is both surprising and impressive that this movement would come from a company in the uncontested lead.
You can now view your Facebook news feed in YouTube, and broadcast your YouTube ratings in Facebook. While LinkedIn has had Microsoft Outlook integration for a while, it's recently been joined by MySpace and Facebook via the Outlook Social Connector service. For users who prefer to access their email on any computer, Facebook and Twitter can be connected through Gmail.
While Facebook Chat doesn't have as appealing an interface as many other chat programs, its convenient access to one's entire friend list has helped to maintain its appeal. Recently Facebook teamed up with AOL to allow users to communicate with both sets of friends through a single service. With the addition of XMPP service, Facebook Chat can now be easily integrated with third-party clients in much the same way as Google Chat.
Facebook is also integrating with Paypal to make it easier to purchase credits for games and virtual gifts, and is even beginning to integrate with MySpace. So far the service only integrates the sharing of Fan Videos, but many analysts are taking it a sign of things to come.
With all these signs of integration, it is certainly an auspicious time for a new social networking service to appear, but Google Buzz burst onto the scene in early February. Buzz aggregates update feeds from numerous services and presents them alongside one's Gmail inbox. It acts sort of like FriendFeed, a similarity noted by Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and co-founded FriendFeed.
The service is very new and still has noticeable bugs, including update lag, and one-sided services (one can view, but not reply to Tweets, for example). It is also suffering from clumsy early adopters seeking to use it as yet another advertising platform. Some users are also finding themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of updates. Within two days of its launch, over nine million events were broadcast on Buzz.
Google claims that Buzz is not an attempt to replace current social networking sites like Facebook. They have designed it to be more about ideas and conversations than events and comments. One of its most recent features is a Buzz Button that can be added to Wordpress accounts, bringing the discussion out of a blog's comment feed and into an entirely new service whose sole purpose is sharing opinions and ideas. While the concept is noble, it remains to be seen whether Buzz will become the Internet's Town Square or yet another Water Cooler.
The service is not without controversy, however. In its first three weeks of existence it is already raising privacy concerns, discussing expansions and features, and facing a class action lawsuit. None of these things are new to Google, however, as the company is still investigating a hacking incident believed to have been organized by the Chinese government, continuing to devote itself to numerous lab projects, and skirting the edges of copyright violation by scanning books.
It is quickly becoming an inarguable fact that people like to share minutiae given the opportunity. What still remains unclear is whether we will accept numerous integrated services, or shirk the complications in favour of a single, all-encompassing service, and which company will aspire to this end.
Facebook currently enjoys twice the monthly visitors of MySpace, which itself doubles the popularity of Twitter. Other sites like Classmates.com and LinkedIn make the list, but are hardly competitive. While Facebook could easily look down its nose at its pitiable competitors, it has thrown them a bone in the form of Facebook Connect.
Superficially, Facebook Connect is a fairly simple tool that allows users to log on to various services with their Facebook credentials. On a broader scale, however, it represents a movement among Internet companies away from total autonomy and towards interconnectedness. This should be an intuitive move, given that these companies are built on a technology designed to connect. However, it is both surprising and impressive that this movement would come from a company in the uncontested lead.
You can now view your Facebook news feed in YouTube, and broadcast your YouTube ratings in Facebook. While LinkedIn has had Microsoft Outlook integration for a while, it's recently been joined by MySpace and Facebook via the Outlook Social Connector service. For users who prefer to access their email on any computer, Facebook and Twitter can be connected through Gmail.
While Facebook Chat doesn't have as appealing an interface as many other chat programs, its convenient access to one's entire friend list has helped to maintain its appeal. Recently Facebook teamed up with AOL to allow users to communicate with both sets of friends through a single service. With the addition of XMPP service, Facebook Chat can now be easily integrated with third-party clients in much the same way as Google Chat.
Facebook is also integrating with Paypal to make it easier to purchase credits for games and virtual gifts, and is even beginning to integrate with MySpace. So far the service only integrates the sharing of Fan Videos, but many analysts are taking it a sign of things to come.
With all these signs of integration, it is certainly an auspicious time for a new social networking service to appear, but Google Buzz burst onto the scene in early February. Buzz aggregates update feeds from numerous services and presents them alongside one's Gmail inbox. It acts sort of like FriendFeed, a similarity noted by Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and co-founded FriendFeed.
The service is very new and still has noticeable bugs, including update lag, and one-sided services (one can view, but not reply to Tweets, for example). It is also suffering from clumsy early adopters seeking to use it as yet another advertising platform. Some users are also finding themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of updates. Within two days of its launch, over nine million events were broadcast on Buzz.
Google claims that Buzz is not an attempt to replace current social networking sites like Facebook. They have designed it to be more about ideas and conversations than events and comments. One of its most recent features is a Buzz Button that can be added to Wordpress accounts, bringing the discussion out of a blog's comment feed and into an entirely new service whose sole purpose is sharing opinions and ideas. While the concept is noble, it remains to be seen whether Buzz will become the Internet's Town Square or yet another Water Cooler.
The service is not without controversy, however. In its first three weeks of existence it is already raising privacy concerns, discussing expansions and features, and facing a class action lawsuit. None of these things are new to Google, however, as the company is still investigating a hacking incident believed to have been organized by the Chinese government, continuing to devote itself to numerous lab projects, and skirting the edges of copyright violation by scanning books.
It is quickly becoming an inarguable fact that people like to share minutiae given the opportunity. What still remains unclear is whether we will accept numerous integrated services, or shirk the complications in favour of a single, all-encompassing service, and which company will aspire to this end.
