OpenSocial Is Doomed: Marc Cuban’s Facebook-Yahoo Mashup Fantasies
Marc Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and internet pundit extraordinaire, has weighed in on the OpenSocial versus Facebook debate and believes that Google and friends are too late, provided that “Facebook opens their API up further and allows for its use outside the Facebook.com domain.”
Cuban imagines combining Facebook with Yahoo to enable the search engine to take advantage of data, like your Facebook status, as a means to “customize the results according to information culled from your profile.”
As Cuban says, prefacing a search by looking at user’s Facebook mood (in Cuban’s words “what is my search mood today: Information, entertainment, purchasing, bored…”) could be used to provide more useful search results.
Like most things Cuban tend to write, it sounds good, but it ignores as many ideas as it offers.
For one thing, most Facebook users tout the service’s privacy as one of its chief appeals, getting those same users to suddenly share their profile data with outside domains would tough — even attempting it would likely incur a certain amount of user wrath.
But the even more basic problem is that Cuban is assuming Facebook will remain as popular in the future as it today. Certainly Yahoo would have to accept that premise if they were to build the platform Cuban imagines.
The press is already latching onto to the idea that many college students are starting to look elsewhere for private networks geared toward them and competitors continue to pop up.
Despite how it may seem at the moment, Facebook will inevitably be replaced by something else. At the moment I haven’t seen anything that’s likely to do it, yet, but as any early adopting hipster can tell you, when Scoble has an account, your service has jumped the shark, when Scoble maxes out your friends list limitations, your service is headed for the same shelf where the lost, never aired episode about Fonz slaying dragons in Medieval Europe is stashed.
But the advantage of Google’s OpenSocial over Facebook’s platform that Cuban is missing here is that when Facebook disappears its proprietary development model goes with it, whereas OpenSocial’s site-independent model can gain and lose sites as they chase user whims and popularity, without ever affecting the framework. New sites come along and adopt it, old sites fade from popularity and disappear, much like the web itself.
OpenSocial in the end may not be that successful either (does Scoble have an account yet?), but the very fact that it transcends a single site offers it a reach and endurance potential that far outstrips anything Facebook has right now.
See Also:
- Marc Cuban On The Future Of Computing
- Mark Cuban And EFF Debate YouTube And Copyright
- Google Cracks Open The World Of Social Networks
- What Can Users Expect From OpenSocial?
- John McCrea Of Plaxo Talks About Google’s OpenSocial Platform
- The Next Social Network? It's Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are
- A Slap In The Facebook Follow-up
- Brad Fitzpatrick, The Creator Of LiveJournal, On The Long Road To Open Social Networks
