I should’ve contextualized this a little better – I actually agree with you but what’s important here is what *Facebook* believes. And absolutely nothing in the history of the actions of the company and its management give me any reason to believe that they are able/willing to own up to the actual situation of their company. We shall see – love to be proven wrong, here.

Stutzman San, you truely are the Facebok Zen master.

JKD:

> They won’t do that, of course,

Well, AOL presumably makes more money from an mail system that is compatible with every other one then their earlier closed format: less per user, indeed, but far more users. Many more technologies would never have taken off without open standards; Facebook knows that. They also knows that Family/Work/Party don’t alway work so well and might wish to discharge one of two of those facets to LinkedIn-likes. . . So, no, I don’t think it is *obvious* that it is in Facebook’s well-understood interest to control it all.

Closing features is distinct issue — but similarly not an obvious strategy. Actually, if one is a known dominant player, but doesn’t control a majority of the market (like it is the case for Facebook & other SNS) it is in his interest to open standards. This makes it more easy for the majority of users to move around, and most would follow the zeitgest, or simply abide by their friends who are well implanted in a monochrome environnement i.e. more would *come to the leader*.

And, for lack of any better reason: Facebook’s closeness is driving significant reputation issues, and the only significant asset of the company is the widespread saliance, the social concensus of presence there. If Facebook abuses users’ patience, many entrepreneurs could copy their technology, rent servers and see users switch to a new equilibrium, like what happened to Friendster.

I sincerly think playing nice is the dominant strategy for Facebook — but educating the crowd on the difficulty raised by co-creation of context, and it’s lack of separability. . . that’s a far more daunting task, and I’m glad Fred is here to fight that battle against ignorance.

I think all of your suggestions are good ones but the central fact is that Facebook has a massive disincentive to move at all towards user control of personal information. Their own post-S-Curve future revenue model is still… speculative, let’s say, and the idea that they would voluntarily surrender their most valuable – indeed, their only – asset without really having to do so seems improbable.

One way of looking at it is that FB is in the situation that American carmakers were in in the 1990s: making big profits/buzz on a short-term strategy (selling SUVs/riding the S-curve) but with a business that (for differing reasons, to be sure) was fundamentally unsound in the long-term. There’s a choice to be made: keep doing what you’re doing and risk total irrelevance a few years down the road, or make the tough decision and realize that while you might be fooling some people now, you know that you’re not as valuable as people think you are in the long term.

For FB, making that decision would involve working on an open identity protocol, where users can host their own data and give contingent (and revocable) permissions for others (friends, app providers like FB) to access it and draw their networks (or whatever else), and then setting themselves up as a compelling service provider in an open marketplace. They won’t do that, of course, because it means admitting that they’re not worth however many billion dollars everyone thinks they are. But not doing that or something similar does hasten the day when forces outside of FB’s control will render that judgment, anyhow.