How Quickly the Glimmer Fades
Last week, after the Facebook Platform Launch, Techmeme was awash with agog. Everyone loved it.
As I sat in the audience watching the keynote and then later watching the widget awards at the end of the Hackathon, I was confused. Sure, the Facebook Platform is fun to mess around with - but is it really compelling?
Paul Kedrosky hit the nail on the head by calling it "The Microsoft Office of Social Apps." Others have called it Prodigy or AOL - all of which fit - but Office seems to really capture it for me.
Office and Facebook apps are mediocre but convenient. If they continue to capture the networking infrastructure of the masses, they will also be ubiquitous.
Paul says that people:
... just want their social software all in one place, all from the same interface, and then they want to move on and get their (social/presence) work done.
This is a huge point. When I load up Firefox in the morning, I click on the "JimKit" bookmarks folder and tell it to launch-in-tabs. Instantly I have well over a dozen sites that require my attention every day. Having my web presence in one cohesive application (no matter how mediocre) would be of great benefit.
The fright is ... will we end up losing more than we gain? There were things I could do in EasyWriter in 1988 that I still can't do in Word. Outlook is perhaps the most bloated, poorly thought out program in history - yet you cannot escape it. Everything syncs with Outlook because it's the only game in town (Google Calendar, please improve your syncing!).
The AOL / Prodigy argument is not lost on me either. One person described it as "Oh no! It's the personalized web!" And that it would be. It would be AOL's lowest-common-denomiator design patterns and so-simple-a-monkey-could-understand-it assumptions.
Which, pretty much, is also true of Office.
The good news is that, without major improvements, Facebook is still a substandard way to manage your social networks. Office has been able to remain powerful and substandard because their waterfall development processes have ruled the market. In other words, Office has remained powerful because it gained its power pre-web.
This includes release cycles of 18 months to 2 years. People don't have patience for that any more. If Facebook doesn't show constant improvement, their audience will stray and their competitors will take over.
Blogged at The Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington using Windows Live Writer.
Comments