Facebook opening up?
Brian alerted me to a post by Dave Winer, called Facebook *is* opening up. It’s true! Some Facebook content is now easily available as RSS feeds: for example a feed of items which have been posted by my ‘friends’. Note how you don’t need to be logged in to Facebook (or have an account for that matter) to use this. Dave reports that, in fact, these feeds have been available for some time. Nonetheless, as he says:
According to convention wisdom, Facebook was, until today, considered a sandbox, a walled garden, a silo. Now that we know that the feeds are being implemented (many are still needed to make it really open) it’s possible for Facebook-generated data to percolate into other Internet applications. As Fred Wilson has wisely pointed out, there is no winner-take-all outcome possible, and closed sandboxes just encourage route-arounds, so what Facebook is doing is smart and necessary.
For me, Facebook just became considerably more interesting. As I said in a previous post:
If facebook’s social networks were exposed to the web, ‘mine-able’ and mashable - now that would be exciting.
I’m not excited just yet…. we need to see more ‘opening up’, but I’m watching with real interest now.
UPDATE: The default privacy setting for most of the content a user can add to Facebook appears to be “All my networks and all my friends“. This is the most ‘open’ of the settings possible - there is no ‘public’ or ‘absolutely everyone’ setting. So when when one of my friends changes their status message for example they might, if they care at all, be under the impression that this can only be viewed by their friends (including me) and people in their network(s). If I then go and publish the feed URL to the world, this information is now available without restriction.
Have I betrayed the trust of my ‘friends’ by making such an RSS feed available? Is this model broken?
August 17th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
> Have I betrayed the trust of my ‘friends’ by making such an RSS feed available?
Yes, you’ll now be shunned by your former friends in your online social networks. And don’t you dare turn up to the pub on the 28 August
Seriously though, as we discussed the aspect of openness is very complex mashup of technical issues and social and culturally specific expectations.
Perhaps Facebook is so successful because of its closed nature, and not despite of it?
And maybe our IT development community won’t be capable of developing an alternative to Facebook because are beliefs and development approaches won’t deliver services which will have the viral appeal to our users?
But maybe not. My view is that we need to be open in our questioning and avoid sticking to established positions - as I think we (UKOLN, OSS Watch and Eduserv folk) in general are.
August 18th, 2007 at 7:54 am
I agree that openness is a complex notion, with many subtleties. I think this issue with the RSS feeds in Facebook is a little more prosaic - they appear to have broken their own privacy model.
One interpretation of this situation is that if the idea of openness isn’t ‘baked in’ to the system from the get-go, it might be quite difficult to add it at a later date….
August 20th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Yeah, Andy and I had noticed these feeds appearing.
I think you may be right about the privacy problem though. Do a search at Bloglines for “Facebook” in feed titles. Gulp. From a very quick skim of some of them, I suspect many of those people don’t realise they’ve made their content public.
The Fb feeds should really be protected by HTTP authentication, I think, rather than by embedding the “key” in the URI.
August 21st, 2007 at 11:19 am
Feeding, Facebook and privacy…
Both here and, err, down the boozer, Andy and I have been critical of Facebook’s failure to provide feeds out from Facebook, so that content created within Facebook can be piped in to other applications. Paul Walk, tipped off by…
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:01 am
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