IT history is repeating itself - but it is not a shame
Following a twitter discussion with Tom Wentworth , Kevin Cochrane and Stephane Croisier on the impact of Facebook Connect on Web Content Management, Stephane made following comment, which needs an answer in more than 140 characters.
Facebook Connect is a technology that allows third party web applications to connect and share data with the Facebook social network. It supports authentication, access to user properties like name and birthday, and it allows sharing of application data on Facebook, for example a website could post custom status notices that would appear in my Facebook activity stream as "Lars did xyz on site abc". Jeremiah Owyang called Facebook Connect an example of Social Colonization earlier this year. And while in Jeremiah's description the colonization turns out to the mutual benefit of Facebook and the connecting site, there is still a negative connotation with the term "Colonization", which is shared by many people in the industry, most of them outside Facebook.
The cornerstone of our discussion is that while Facebook Connect is the most popular example for social network interoperability technology, there are numerous other emerging standards and technologies that can be used to create a distributed social network. The most important examples are:
- RSS /ATOM - a way to exchange data in feeds between applications on the web
- OpenID - a way to identify yourself to a website using the credentials of another website
- OAuth - a way to grant an application access to a certain part of your data on a website
- OpenSocial - a way to exchange data about users between social networks
- OpenSocial Gadgets - a way to embed small web applications, gadgets into other websites
- ActivityStreams - a way to share the activity of an user on a social network with other websites
- DISO - a collection of technologies to create a distributed social network
This open ecosystem allows developers to create distributed social networks without relying on a single centralized "Conquistador" like Facebook who controls data and access to the system. Yet, for now I would recommend website owners to invest resources first into implementing Facebook Connect. The main reasons are: you get access to the largest possible user base, the integration model is well tested and needs no fiddling with multiple, developing technologies and users already know what to expect from a Facebook Connect integration. Once the limitations of the centralized model become obvious, for example because the central hub is unable to scale, loses the trust of users, or benevolence turns into malevolence - then it is time to federate and to invest into open standards and open source.
This pattern can be observed numerous times in technology: a proprietary leader defines the market, fails in an attempt to fully dominate the market and is attacked by other players in the industry striving for standardization and openness. "If you have a problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem, but a fact". It think this pattern is not a sign of our industries inability to learn, but a result of the basic economies of innovation.
- Innovation is hard and costly, so you try to keep it for yourself (proprietary)
- In technology, network effects make successful innovations wildly successful
- In order to fully monetize the hit innovation you had, you have to keep a close grip to it
This explains why hit innovators are favoring closed solutions: it is the easiest way of getting their investment back. What worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, worked for Oracle, worked for Apple, worked for Facebook, so why shouldn't it work for your next innovation? In fact, it will work for the innovator, it just won't work for users. Companies do not do the right things all the time, but if you are locked in into a technology, you are betting on your vendor hitting one home run after the other. And this is why users and visionary followers are pushing for openness, standardization and decentralization - another significant effort, but one that requires an existing, proven market to justify the investment in standardization.
The reason why history is repeating itself is simple: we cannot start out with a standardized solution, because we neither know what to standardize nor if it is worth the effort. Once we know, there is an established, proprietary player that is holding to his closed technology.
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