S OS - A Social Operating System for the Internet

Facebook launched their API yesterday with some big claims:

Facebook Expands Into MySpace’s Territory - New York Times

In the parlance of its 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the company is positioning itself as a “social operating system” for the Internet. It wants to sit at the center of its users’ online lives in the same way that Windows dominates their experience on a PC — while improving its own prospects for a lucrative acquisition or an eventual public offering.

Sorry Facebook, that's interesting, but it aint gonna happen. Why not? Because you're essentially a closed system. It's a very nice neat space and all that (I saw it yesterday described as the 'suburbs', which just about sums it up), but it aint the internet. It's a (very) small subset of it.
More than that, you're a one way street. Sure, you've nicely opened up your application via your API, but what about pushing stuff that happens inside Facebook out to third party applications? How about widgetising your content and pushing it into everything else that's offering things in the world?
Surely a 'social operating system' would float above or below small islands such as Facebook and provide all the hooks and services that any application needed to be social. The real S OS for the internet is already being built - built as an expression of APIs and widgets from a huge range of existing applications. As developers can pick and choose which of these underlying functions they want to use in their application, we will see the S OS exposed. Until then, dream on Facebook - good marketing speak, nothing more.

Comments

[Steve Bowbrick]

I think you're being a bit harsh. It's a big step for a platform owner to open up in this way. A more interesting question than 'why doesn't Facebook open the platform entirely?' is 'how far can closed platforms go with openness before they trash their own business models?' or 'is a return on investment even possible in a 100% open, widgetised ecology?' If you see what I mean?

[Steve Bowbrick]

I think you're being a bit harsh. It's a big step for a platform owner to open up in this way. A more interesting question than 'why doesn't Facebook open the platform entirely?' is 'how far can closed platforms go with openness before they trash their own business models?' or 'is a return on investment even possible in a 100% open, widgetised ecology?' If you see what I mean?

[william]

It’s time for Face Book to Pay Up.

The End of the Plantation system.

I would like to help a bit in bringing about a new era on the Internet. We can call it web 3.0, or 2.5. I will leave the definition to others that are better at this kind of thing.

This will be the era of a true revolution in the power of site members. An era where members have the power and the ability to be rewarded monetarily for the value that they add and the revenues that are generated from their work and participation.

[well worth reading, read the rest here http://williamdyson.wordpress.com/]