Can you trust Facebook to be your Social Operating System?
Quite a few people have been asking why they should use other social networking sites now that Facebook is the platform of choice. It’s the new Microsoft, the new empowering development platform and Facebook apps are the greatest and every company should have one. Everything is ultimately on Facebook so there is no need to go anywhere else.
I’m certain that Guy Kawasaki understands why moving to one platform is a bad thing. Lock out. Digital Life Disabled. Just like Guy your account can be shut down with warning or without.
How can you recover? If Facebook is a black hole then anything you’ve contributed solely within their world is now inaccessible. Facebook, the Social Operating System, has a number of drawbacks when compared to traditional OSes. When Windows crashes you may be able to restore a backup.. or these days due to diversification a lot of our important data lives in the cloud with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and more. When Facebook crashes you’ll quickly figure out that there’s not a lot you can do to restore it. If you’re trusting a single point of access it’s actually a single point of failure. If you’ve jumped into the Facebook platform with both feet then it’s your contact list, instant messaging, email, photo sharing and more. These are critical applications with no formal level of support. That doesn’t sound too smart.
Facebook can also change its terms and conditions at its discretion. Due to the real-time delivery of the web you can’t just opt out of questionable new features. Just wait until you have to deal with the Facebook Genuine Advantage! Look at all the love Microsoft has received.
One of the best features of Facebook is that it lets you control the privacy of your profile. It puts you in control of what other people see, great stuff right? Except that Facebook can determine at any time, willfully or in error, to take away that identity. Poof. Disabled. You’re not really in control. You do not have Administrator access.
So what can you do? While Facebook can be an excellent for aggregating information from multiple sources you can still maintain information on other established services like LinkedIn and even MySpace. You should also push the envelop by checking out the better designed sites like Pownce and Virb. Be mindful that what goes into Facebook doesn’t come out. Until a new social networking site with a truly open platform comes along you may want to be careful what you contribute.
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