wrong tool

You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.

Open Facebook API or what to do about Facebook

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When I left Zynga in 2013, I was convinced that Facebook was a malevolent entity run by leaders who could not be trusted. But I was also bitter about a 6$ stock price and my life choices.

Fast-forward to 2019, and it turns out that what I thought was just sour grapes, undersold the net harm Facebook has created.

An option that isn’t considered very seriously is the following simple proposal. Don’t break up Facebook, but regulate the access to and control of the friend graph and the ability to use the friend graph to publish information.

In 2012, when Facebook and Zynga stood off, the debate that was at the heart of the disagreement was ownership of the friend graph. Facebook believe they owned the friend graph and by extension owned how it could be used. We disagreed. In the end, we caved. I know this because I worked on the software systems necessary to create a parallel friend graph of people who were friends with other people who played Zynga games.

Facebook would love for us to spend time talking about breaking things up, instead of talking about the one thing that matters, a regulated open-api and regulated data portability.

Consider the messenger space. Because the friend graph is in my personal address book, it’s trivial to talk to several dozen different friends. Because the content is on my phone, typically pictures or documents, I can share anything with anyone.

Consider how many more messenger apps there are, versus how many social networks there are.

But let’s look to the past. During the failed MSFT anti-trust trial, a peculiar part of the agreement said that MSFT could no longer have private APIs, and that they had to communicate changes in a very specific public way.

This ruling enabled NetApp, which had built a reverse engineered CIFS server to survive and thrive. Because MSFT was losing the CIFS business, it also pushed MSFT to look for alternatives to CIFS, like SharePoint for document sharing and collaboration.

But over the long term, it enabled companies like Box and Google Drive and other file-sharing companies to emerge. Without the guarantee that a single man couldn’t break an API, a healthy and vibrant ecosystem in data storage has emerged.

If we had an open-social graph, and an open api, and data portability then I suspect that over time new social networks would emerge. Every social network would probably cater to different kinds of people.

In many ways Facebook does this today with Facebook Groups. For example, I happen to have joined two Facebook groups, one dedicated to old-school rpg, and another to 5E. The two groups hate each other. But because my social graph is portable, I can communicate to both groups within facebook.

Or we can even go back to Facebook’s origins. When Mr. Zuckerberg opened up the API, he promised it was going to be open and portable. He lied, of course, but not before Mark Pincus and Zynga figured out how to exploit the graph to grow Facebook’s business. Once, Mr. Zuckerberg figured out that owning the graph and how you communicate with it was very valuable, he squashed us like a bug. And destroyed the Facebook app eco-system.

Which brings me to regulation, we can’t trust Mr. Zuckerberg . Like we couldn’t trust Mr. Gates. And breakups don’t always work. Look at ATT, 40 years after the breakup, they control everything, again.

The real story behind net-neutrality?

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There is a lot of dialogue about net-neutrality, what isn’t really discussed is this problem:

Jeff Reading, a communications director for Mayor Ed Murray, told MyNorthwest.com that the city wants people to limit their “non-essential mobile conversation” so that cell networks can stay unclogged in case of emergencies.

Basically the mobile internet was not built to handle video and the huge volume of images that we’re creating.

Everyone involved in creating rich media applications knows this or should…

There is a debate raging over how do we pay for the necessary infrastructure upgrade.

This is a classic IT vs Business Group debate with no CEO in charge to make a decision. In a traditional company the business team wants something out of IT, and IT is happy to provide as long the business group provides the budget … These debates go on for months until someone either finds another way to solve the problem or someone caves.

In a more socialist country, the state would just foot the bill and we would have better pipes. In our less socialist country, corporate entities argue amongst themselves and appointed officials make decisions based on interpretations of the law that result in further litigation that ultimately result in someone paying the bill…

The basic problem is the following:

  • The content management companies and content distribution companies want to force IT to pay for the bill from their budget
  • IT wants to get a piece of the action and wants the content management businesses to pay more for the infrastructure build out.

And billions of dollars of wealth for the owners and senior managers of those companies are at stake. This will take a while to resolve. The infrastructure build out to support the new network is going to be colossal. We are going to need new handsets, towers, gateways and backbones and all of that is going to be very expensive to replace and upgrade.

The one company that is taking an orthogonal point-of-view to this debate is Google. Google is basically telling IT: Screw you… if you won’t build it we will… And so we have Google Fiber.  And Google’s action may force traditional IT to pay for the upgrade through internal operational optimization rather than new sources of revenue … Proving to me, at least, Google is one of the most interesting companies on the planet.