Facebook is the next Dylan
Is it any wonder people outside the valley think we’ve got the attention span of a hummingbird out here? Eight weeks ago, social networking site Facebook announced it would serve as a platform for widgets and applications built by third-party developers, and the blogosphere burst with predictions of great things (see “Open Facebook: Let them build it and they will come“). Three weeks ago, the sentiment of the chattering class had shifted, with questions about Facebook’s ad model and the wisdom of building a closed system; blogger Jason Kottke even dubbed Facebook the next AOL (see “Landscapers report increased demand for walled gardens“).
So yesterday, Facebook makes its first acquisition, a start-up called Parakey that is working on a Web operating system, an open platform for which developers could write applications that work both online and off, and today everybody’s searching for superlatives again. “Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?” wonders TechCrunch. Master of 500 Hats declares, “Kottke is wrong — Facebook isn’t AOL; it’s Visual Basic.” Robert Scoble says it’s “the new data black hole,” and that’s a good thing in the Scoble universe — a single location to suck in all the information you have scattered around the Web.
But even if you filter out any rhetorical excesses, the purchase of Parakey (assets consisting of the brains of two of the developers of the Firefox browser) clearly signals Facebook’s ambitions: Taking a cue from Microsoft’s book, it wants to own the platform that becomes a de facto standard, and unlike Google, it isn’t shy about admitting it (see “The chart on this first slide shows Google’s total indifference to Microsoft“).
With all this hoopla about Google, Facebook, etc. the fact remains that less than 20 percent of the world population is tied into the internet, according the World Internet Usage statistics. The internet has not yet become ubiquitous.
The next Dylan? Do you mean http://www.opendylan.org/ ? Talk about damning with faint praise…
@ChrisK
I think the writer’s referencing Bob Dylan. For years and years now every single new singer/songwriter with even a glimmer of talent is instantly dubbed “…the next Dylan,” much in the same way that Dylan himself was “…the next Woody Guthier.” It’s so overused in the music industry to be almost sickening but I think the author puts it to very good use here. So cheers, to both the writer and ChrisK.
There’s a reason that Facebook is doing so well, it lives and breathes. My Facebook homepage is a dialogue of my friends’ and colleagues’ lives. The other social networks are stagnant. Got a summary of why it’s breaking out of the pack.
http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=213
The press were laughing at them last year for demanding $1 billion in valuation. Today they’re probably worth a lot more. Microsoft may be picking them up, many of their employees are already users.