Bye bye Facebook

I have finally decided to delete my Facebook account. I could write a long post analyzing this decision, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just quote a short note that I’m going to publish on my Facebook wall.

I have decided to leave Facebook. I never really liked it in the first place. It was fun commenting on your photos and your status messages, learning all those little details about you that I never really cared for and watching you throwing Britney Spears’ to each other.

I won’t miss the myriads of utterly useless groups you’ll continue to become members of, nor the bazillions of ugly applications cluttering your “walls”. And I’m pretty sure Facebook won’t hire a designer before either cold fusion replaces oil or Google hires one.

I am going to delete my account on February the 27th, a day after my birthday. This way you can all wish me happy birthday by writing on my wall and save the phone call or sms! (That is, before Facebook reads this note, gets mad and kicks me out of it before that date!)

I am jumping off the social crap wagon, but you’ll still be able to find me on Twitter (@Karageorgakis). That is, until I delete myself from there too, but I don’t think this will happen pretty soon.

I urge you to re-consider your goals in your everyday time-wasting habits and ponder the question of whether you need to create detailed records of your lives on some (rich by now) twenty-something guy’s servers. I won’t do that anymore.

So take care, have fun and be well. I hope to see you in the real world.

A probably dark future for Facebook Connect

Since the credit crunch and the crisis in economy started to show their ugly heads, pessimistic scenarios of doom and gloom circulated the Internet. VCs signaled their own mayday, advising their customers to save cash, lay low and accept a possible M&A in order to survive. In other words, they’re telling smaller companies that if they want to stay in business, they better sell themselves to the bigger ones if such an opportunity is raised.

But this doesn’t apply only to small companies. The lack of credit in the world makes value not so “valuable” without cash to back it up, and it has been said that even web start-ups that have been uber successful (like Twitter) could be in danger if they don’t find a way to monetize soon. Considering the hard times that are coming, that’s true. When all cash is burnt, the company either goes to the deadpool, or sells itself to someone with loads of cash.

Facebook faces a monetization problem as well. It may be the biggest social network in the world today (at least in terms of users and visits), yet it had failed to find a way to monetize since not so many people care to click on its ads. However, Facebook does have a lot of cash right now, a part of which (a mere $240 million) comes from investments by Microsoft. But why did Microsoft want to invest in Facebook? I think it was because of fear; fear that Google would, eventually, buy Facebook.

Facebook Connect vs. Open Social

The reason Google would want to buy Facebook is simple: to make it support Open Social, instead of Facebook’s own proprietary Connect. Both of these APIs make it possible to share information from one social network to another. For example, you could use your Facebook account (you have one, right?) to connect to another social network with the same credentials, access your friends list and even do stuff there that would inform Facebook to post a story on your wall.

Facebook Connect

This is so powerful, that it could even merge with OpenID. For example, LivePoker, an iPhone app, lets you play poker online through the device by logging into the system using your Facebook account. Then, you can play against other Facebook users or your friends if they’re online. This way, you don’t have to create yet another account for the LivePoker service, and you’re carrying with you all the social information you’ve so deliberately crafted in Facebook to present yourself online. It’s a huge thing, and Google definitely lusts for it.

All data should be open and accessible

Google wants everything to be open. They’re big supporters of openness. Android is an open API, and they managed to get the FCC to support openness in the wireless spectrum. They simply want all data to be accessible, so they can index it and use it. Google wants to have access to all information there is out there in the world; they want to know everything about anything and they have an infrastructure to support this. If Facebook goes against this openness and insists on using their own proprietary API for their own good, Google has no other solution than to acquire them and force them to open up and conform to Open Social.

Considering this, Microsoft did a good thing investing in the popular social network, thus extending its runway and delaying such an acquisition. Otherwise, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the board could quite probably find themselves considering an M&A with Google when the times are dark and the cash has gone, which would happen if they don’t find a way to monetize. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but at least for now they have time to try and find such a solution.

The dreaded Google – Facebook M&A

Future Facebook

Why do I speak of such an M&A as dreadful? Because it will probably be one of the most big-brother-ish things we’ll see in the years to come. When everything will be social and there will hardly be any human in the western civilization without an online presence, when all the major and minor web services will be supporting open APIs to exchange information (that is, our personal data) and our social network account will become the One Universal ID, I’d be afraid of Google claiming this data for their own use. That is simply going to be too much power in one company’s hands.

Think about it this way: they’ll be crawling and index the whole Web as well as bazillions of e-mail messages from millions of users (Gmail & Google Apps), they’ll be running major web services on their infrastructure (Google App Engine), they’ll have mapped the whole globe (Google Maps & Google Earth) and they’ll have created a “cloud” that would pretty much know everything about anything (like I said in another post that’s what Google officially claim as their goal). I wouldn’t want them to “own” my One Universal ID credentials as well.

One account. One ID. One company. Scares the bejesus out of me.